Star Trek: Exodus
by Crazy 3ddie
Summary: Twenty five years ago, SS Columbia disappeared with all hands in an uncharted solar system. Now, the crew of the USS Enterprise have followed its distress beacon to a harsh alien world where the survivors have built a thriving colony from the wreckage of their former lives. The new colony on Talos Four should be a monument to man's triumph over adversity. If only it were real...
1. Chapter 1

**THE CAPTAIN'S BURDEN**

Thorne System - FGC88305  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.30 - Captain's Log

 _It is twenty eight hours since our departure from the Doppelgänger system. Note commendations for Chief Engineer Scott and Engineer's Mate P'droy Keenser for their timely repairs of the warp drive engines and critical repairs to our outer hull battle damage nearly twelve hours ahead of schedule. Minor repairs continue on damaged pressure hull sections, but vessel status remains fully operational._

 _We have submitted our final report on the Doppelgänger phenomenon [see attachment] as well as our battle report as far as the Gorn trawler Francium. The final wearabouts of the Romulan vessel or the Klingon ship pursuing it are unknown, but given their respective missions I don't believe this is the last time we'll be seeing them out here. Long-range probes suggest the Cardassian ship Grazine remains in orbit of the inner planet as its surviving crew attempts to restore its damaged warp drives. Mister Spock theorizes that they will probably try to strike a deal with Chellik in exchange for repairs and passage back home, and Chellik will probably dissect them and copy their memories to his files. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch. Furthermore, it is my assessment that the Romulan infiltrators were unable to transmit any of the information they obtained from the Enterprise back to their mother ship, and it is probable that most of that information was lost during the firefight in the Grazine's shuttlebay. Assuming the Cardassians ever manage to leave that system alive, Starfleet security need not be considered compromised._

 _My final conclusion is that our brief contact with the First Federation has been as a front-level nature and cannot be interpreted as official communication. Same conclusion regarding the Gorn. Contact with the Cardassian government may be considered official communications, but I an disinclined to interpret the actions of their exploration vessel as sanctioned by the Detapa Republic, and peaceful relations may still be possible. My official recommendation regarding the First Federation as follows: Avoid contact under any and all circumstances._

 _The crew is showing signs of depressed morale as well as emotional and physical exhaustion, much to my complete lack of surprise. My final investigation faults Doctor Carol Marcus for failing to observe onboard security protocols, but after everything that's happened I've decided not to pursue any further action on this regard beyond the official reprimands I have already entered into the record. Beyond that, the total loss of the Genesis Data is punishment enough. To that end: our planned expedition of the Eagle Nebula requires long-range transit of the Vega Corridor, and I expect a shore leave opportunity to present itself before too long. Enterprise is scheduled to get underway within the next eight hours once we tie up our last loose ends._

\- 1941 hours -

Airlock Two was preferred for these occasions, being much larger than the other four complexes and much more comfortable even than the otherwise-identical Airlock One. It was another quirky aviation tradition dating back to the first Earth starships, at a time when most ships only _had_ two airlocks suitable to this purpose. Some two hundred officers and crewmen were gathered on the bottom level and the overhanging catwalk, distributed in the open bay amongst parked travel pods and EVA equipment that was permanently pushed further aside than would normally be practical. The center of it all, planted on a launch rail in front of the ten-foot circular airlock hatch was - of course - the pre-programmed recorder marker bearing the names and last messages of the twenty five Enterprise crewmen who could no longer be counted among the living crew of the Enterprise.

The two hundred gathered here were either close friends or family of the deceased. Decades had passed since a burial in space was an affair that necessarily involved the entire ship; seven years of brutal war with the Romulan Empire had brought that particular tradition to an end, and the frugal nature of the so-called "Boomer Brats" that later inherited Starfleet had been remiss to bring it back. But it made the Captain's job that much worse: the people gathered here weren't just shipmates of the deceased, they were necessarily close friends aboard the Enterprise. The loss was felt, not just lamented on principal.

"By command authority granted by Starfleet Command," Kirk announced solemnly, his voice carried by the audio pickup in the all behind him, "and with the remembrance of respect of the officers and crew of the Federation Starship Enterprise, we dedicate this memorial to final voyage of our fallen comrades and friends: Ensign Maximillian Schnieder, Ensign Shin Shui-Tin, Ensign Timothy Buchannon Junior, Ensign Stephen Vargas, Ensign Beth Petrosky, Ensign Orlando Pryor, Ensign Madeline M'bais, Ensign David Barhneisel. Of Lieutenant Dimitri Loganoff, Lieutenant Frank Hayes, Lieutenant Susan Collins. Of Lieutenant Commander Ikemba Taskun, Lieutenant Commander Jessica "Jelly" Lane, Lieutenant Commander Ik'toah, Lieutenant Commander Sani Ebadi, Lieutenant commander John Thirsk. Of Commander Steven Tanner, Commander Will Jordan, Commander Olivia Asakura. Of Doctor Haro Kusenagi, Ensign H. Ayala, Lieutenant Kembi Onise, Doctor Mioh Hr'arku, Lieutenant Commander Sam McCahill, and Doctor Ramsi Ayash."

By the time he was finished reading the list, the room felt like it had been filled to the top with wet cement. Everyone here knew at least two of the faces that belonged to those names, and especially in the case of the last few, everyone knew the circumstances of their deaths. At the reading of Lieutenant Onise's name there were even a few murmurs of disapproval, but even more of sorrow. Less than a day after the incident, there was some controversy still as to whether the Lieutenant was a victim or an enabler of the disaster that singly contributed six of those names to the list.

"To them and to their memory do we now devote our mission, and to the future of mankind and the safety of the Federation. Let this memorial carry their spirit to the final frontier, and beyond."

The launch rail fed the recorder marker into the outer airlock complex and the hatch closed behind it. An alarm sounded on the deck as the airlock began to cycle, then the hiss of air escaping as the outer doors opened, venting the last of the residual air into space. The memorial buoy was pushed into space by a shove from the launch rails, then fired its maneuvering thrusters and pushed away from the ship, heaving itself into a solar orbit and in essence becoming a new planet of this newly-explored solar system.

There was no established procedure for how to carry on from here. It typically depended on the religious background of the deceased, but in cases of multiple deaths like this, the normal flow of events called for the friends and family to step forward to the podium and say a few words about their departed comrades. There were only a handful of speakers now, limiting themselves to about a minute each, expressing feelings of pride, of loss, of fond farewell. And only when Kirk thought the last of the words had been said did a gain the not altogether unpleasant surprise of an eerily familiar Orion officer in an engineering officer's uniform. It took Kirk a few moments to place the face to a name, and a few moments longer to drag up the relationship from Ayala's personnel file, just in time for him to recognize exactly who was speaking. "Ayala and I came to Earth looking for a new life," said Ensign Gaila in a half-subdued whisper, "And though our adoptive homeworld is a thousand times better than Orion, for the longest time we were still singled out by others who didn't know and us and didn't want to know us. People who couldn't look past the color of our skin. We spent most of our lives being treated like... like toys, like little dolls you could rent out when you were bored. When Ayala said she wanted to join Starfleet, I thought she was crazy. I told her we would end up... like... serving coffee in a thong in the officer's lounge or something. And then she finally talked me into it, and year after year, I started to see she was right. I saw that in Starfleet, we were all equals to anyone else. Not just cardboard cutouts, but real people with real rights. Valued members of a team." Gaila turned and fixed her gaze directly on Captain Kirk. A petty officer next to her sensed what was coming, but didn't quite get to her before she could blurt out, "But now I see I was right all along. We really _are_ just disposable parts to you, aren't we Kirk?! You used my sister just like you used m-" three sets of hands hauled her away from the podium as she started to degenerate into hysterics. Somehow, out of respect for the solemnity of the occasion and a conscious effort not to dignify her outburst with too much attention, the next speaker in line began his remarks as if nothing unusual had even happened.

And Kirk received them in kind, even with a pair of tightly clenched fists. By the time the ceremony had finally drawn to a close, both of his palms were dripping blood.

Interstellar Space  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.39

\- 0330 hours -

The Yellow Alert tone had roused the Captain from a semi-comatose state and catapulted him still half-sleeping into a turbolift to the bridge. He was not quite fully awake until the moment he dropped into his command chair and wrapped himself in the practiced facade of command confidence and ability the crew so completely depended on at times like this. "Report, Spock."

The science officer answered from his display console, "We have intermittent SADAR contact ahead of us, something directly in our path. Evasive action is unsuccessful."

The usual pattern of a gravitic mine, Kirk realized. Judging by the viewscreen display, the Enterprise was still on course for the Eagle Nebula at warp six; that alone told Kirk all he needed to know about the situation at hand. If it was an immediate emergency, Spock would have dropped to impulse and screened with deflectors long before bothering to call the Captain to the bridge. "Can you estimate inertial mass?"

"Not at this distance, but field intensity is immense. Profile is consistent with a Starfleet long-range antiship missile..." Spock's sensor beams suddenly flickered a warning on the overhead displays, "Distance, two point six milliparsecs..."

"Take us out of warp," Kirk ordered, "Deflectors up full."

Enterprise slammed back to sublight velocity in the middle of interstellar space, instantly falling into orbit of the galactic core like a miniature solar system itself. The deflector fields powered on now, then extended their reach to create an impassible barrier in space tens of kilometers around the ship. Whatever was heading towards them, it would have much to cope with if it was after a collision.

Now reduced to impulse power, Spock's sensors had a better view of the universe. Subspace radar as well as passive sensor data came streaming through his monitors now, "Definitely something out there, headed this way."

Ensign Tyler reported from the navigator console, "Contact in thirty seconds! Closing at... warp seven, Sir!"

Kirk punched the intercom button, "All decks, upgrade to condition red! Forward phasers, standby to fire!"

The lightning on the bridge changed to deep red, consoles dimmed and displays adjusted their output to preserve the crew's night vision. Alarm claxons and then a series of audible readiness reports announced the transition of Enterprise from an exploration vessel to a deep space battleship capable of engaging any threat in the galaxy.

"Object slowing to warp two, Sir," Tyler reported, "Now warp one..." in the distance there was a slight rippling effect as something collided with the Enterprise's deflector barrier and somehow managed to push through. It was like watching a heat shimmer from a forest fire move closer and closer until, at last, the object came to a dead stop a few kilometers off the Enterprise' bow.

Lieutenant Garrison magnified the image on screen, and recognizing it reported immediately, "It's a courier, Sir. An old-style recorder marker."

Kirk nodded slowly, understanding dawning on him. "From the old Romulan Wars. They were designed to home in on any passing vessel and use their last bit of fuel to make the intercept."

Garrison looked incredulous, "That seems a bit self-defeating, isn't it?"

Kirk smiled, "The old phase cannons weren't accurate enough to hit targets at that range. Anyway, it was a good way to attract attention."

"Indeed they did," Spock said from the science console, "Whoever 'they' are."

Kirk nodded, "Hannity?"

The communications officer was already hard at work interrogating the recorder marker for its identification code. It took a few seconds for her to call up the relevant communications protocols from the ship's memory, and once she did, "I read it as a private charter vessel, leased to the New Horizon Corporation from UESPA public services devision. NAR-02, SS Columbia. Recorder marker reports catastrophic engine failure, atmospheric interface, emergency landing procedures."

" _The_ Columbia?" It was little more than a historical curiosity now, something most people chalked up to the law of averages catching up to a group of plucky civilians with more enthusiasm than brains. The former second vessel of the NX-Class was nearly a hundred years old when it embarked on its final voyage into uncharted space, never to be heard from again. There was no specific theory about what had doomed the ancient vessel, it was simply _old_ , and had probably failed in a critical way at a critical time along with its crew of homesteaders.

Spock pulled the files from the library computer just moments later, "I have it, Jim. Last known position as of Stardate 2236.187, Sector Thirteen by Four by Seven, M44 quadrant. Given the recorder's present position and their logged flight path, I estimate Columbia's terminal position to be somewhere in the Talos Star Group, four point two light years from our present position."

Kirk did a bit of mental arithmetic and nodded sagely, "That old recorder marker would have taken at least that long to fly towards a major spacelane at impulse speeds... probably launched from _inside_ the system."

Without needing to be asked, Spock called up the ship's records on that system and displayed the subspace telescope data on the overhead screen, "Talos Group is a trinary G-S-C system, multiple superjovian bodies and an unusual abundance of dwarf planets and cometary remnants. Primary system similar to Sol, eleven major planets and forty five dwarf planets. Visited twice by Starfleet, first in 2161 and then 2174 by starships Enterprise and Challenger respectively. Detailed charts by USS Archimedes on Stardate 2219.62 which confirmed planet Four to be Class-M with high prospects for habitability, possible colonization candidate."

Kirk sighed, "It's a shame they never made it."

Garrison glanced over his shoulder, "They _could_ still be alive. Even after twenty five years."

" _If_ they survived the crash. That recorder marker took this long to get into deep space, they probably launched it as a last will and testament."

Spock looked up from his science console in puzzlement, "We're not going to go? To confirm one way or the other?"

The image of Lieutenant Janice Rand, slumped on the transporter pad with a Klingon war saber driven though her chest, flashed through his mind. Kirk shook his head, "Not without any indication of survivors, no. Even at trans-warp, it's three weeks to the Eagle Nebula... I'd prefer not to get sidetracked unnecessarily." Kirk punched the intercom on his chair and announced, "All sections, stand down from Red Alert, set condition green throughout the ship." And closing the intercom, he lurched to his feet and started back for the turbolift, "You have the Conn., Spock. Bring that courier aboard and start downloading the Columbia's last transmissions."

"Aye, Sir..." Spock watched him go with increasing puzzlement, as if watching a shuttlecraft engine going into a stall. Even a Vulcan with little experience with emotion could tell by now, Captain Kirk's personality was growing more sour by the minute.

The turbolift deposited him back in Compartment 205, down the corridor and one deck down from his cabin. He made his way there by way of a ladder and a stretch of corridor that still wasn't completely repaired from battle damage (the overhead lights hadn't worked in a week), slipped into his cabin and hurled himself onto his bed like an old piece of clothing. A text letter from the Daystrom Institute - apparently from The Man Himself with more pointed questions about what had gone wrong in the last mission - was still flickering on the computer terminal. Kirk ignored it, rolled over on his side and prayed for sleep.

And perhaps thirty seconds later, his prayer was answered a resounding "no" as the door to his cabin hissed open and a brooding southerner strolled into the room with a large bottle of amber liquid, two glasses, and a small plastic container filled with something that looked like modeling clay. "Beware Romulans bearing gifts," said Doctor McCoy as he set both items on the table next to the bed. "Happy birthday, Jim."

Kirk rolled over and glowed, "Crazy old man..." then he sat up a little, "Birthday? What birthday?"

"You were _born_ , weren't you? You didn't just congeal out of antisocial quirks and bad moods?"

"Get outa here, Bones..."

McCoy snapped open the plastic container and offered it to him like a precious gift. "Sweet potato pie. My mother's recipe. Goes good with a bit a Tennessee whisky. And if you don't quit feeling sorry for yourself and enjoy one of these things, I'm gonna stick _both_ of them straight up your ass."

In spite of himself, Kirk actually laughed. "I didn't think they still _made_ suppositories."

McCoy poured a glass for Kirk, then another for himself. "My size twelve boot can cure all kinds of ailments when administered in the proper orifice."

"I'll drink to that." Kirk half-heartedly toasted, then sipped the whisky. And when it didn't kick in fast enough, he gulped the entire glass in one sitting, coughed through the afterburn, and rolled back over on his bed feeling perfectly miserable.

"Aw, what the hell..." McCoy sighed, "Truth is, Spock and Nyota told me to come check on you."

Kirk rolled slightly back towards him.

"We may be your junior officers, but off-duty, we're also your friends. We're gettin' worried about you."

"About me?" Kirk rolled all the way over and scowled at the thought of it, "I'm the _Captain_ of this ship. You don't get to worry about me."

"Oh? Is that Starfleet regulations or what?"

Kirk rolled his eyes. "Get to the point, Bones."

"You already know the point, don't be a child." McCoy grabbed his shoulder and rolled him back to face him, "You've been all in a funk ever since we left Doppelgänger. You've been sitting here sulking like a bitter old man..."

"Sulking?" Kirk looked at McCoy and almost laughed, "What _should_ I be doing? Tapdancing on the recreation deck?"

"It's a start."

"Aw hell... you know what it is? Here I am, rookie Captain Greenhorn on his first deep space assignment with only his ego to guide him. A simple research mission is all it was, and what happens? Watch the Greenhorn make a judgement call and twenty five people wind up in the morgue."

"It could have been worse, you know that."

"Yeah. The other sixty eight crewmen in sickbay could have died sooner rather than later."

McCoy sighed, "Perfectionist asshole! Jim, you set standards for yourself _no one_ could meet. You think anyone else in this fleet could have handled that situation as well as you could?"

"I took three fire teams into an alien battleship with no recon scans, no sensor coverage, no beamout point. I lead our people right into a kill box and the goddamn Klingons had us for breakfast."

"Jim-!"

"That should be _me_ lying there half dead in the ICU," Kirk sputtered sourly, "Not Janice. Not Loganoff. Damn... I appointed her to head of security _two days_ before I lead her into a suicide mission! And let's not forget, the only reason we were in that situation is because I let the Enterprise get boarded in the first place."

McCoy poured him another glass, then opened the plastic container and helped himself to a pinch of the sweet potato pie. "As Spock would say, this is all just illogical emotional nonsense. What do you plan to _do_ about it?"

Kirk rubbed his knees as if his legs had started hurting from walking through a maze of his own remorse. "I dunno... I should probably resign before I get court-marshaled."

"And do _what_? Crawl into a bottle in some hayseed bar in Iowa? You and I both know this is the only job you've ever been good at."

"Not good enough. But there are other options."

"Like?"

Kirk shrugged, "I don't know... knock up some blonde, start a family..."

McCoy laughed, "Yeah, right. You being personally responsible for a completely helpless human life that depends on you for its emotional, educational and nutritional needs... yeah, that's _much_ easier than commanding a starship."

"The point is I've got options! As it is, I'm responsible for the lives of seven hundred men and women on a two hundred thousand ton flying city with four and a half billion moving parts. People live or die depending on whether or not I make the right decision at a moment's notice... well Bones, what happens when I'm _wrong_?"

"Then people die. We burry the dead. We learn from our mistakes, and we _move on_."

Kirk stared at his feet, "How many Janice Rands are worth Jim Kirk's experience?"

"That all depends on what you _do_ with that experience, doesn't it?" McCoy sipped his whisky and frowned, "You've got alot of nerve sitting here feeling sorry for yourself when there's a whole shipload of people depending on you for leadership. Maybe it _was_ a mistake, who knows? But like it or not, _you're_ in command, and this ship needs its Captain."

"Bones, I ha-"

"Bridge to Captain Kirk," Spock's voice echoed through the loudspeaker, paging all sections of the ship.

Kirk fumbled for the intercom switch on the computer terminal and answered tiredly, "Kirk here."

"Recorder maker contains remote-access log entry. There _are_ survivors on Talos Four."

Or at least, there _were_. Twenty five years is a long time to be marooned on an alien planet, M-Class or not. Even so... "From our present position, what's our ETA on the Talos Star Group?"

"Four hours at present speed."

Only a small deviation from their course. If there were any survivors, it shouldn't take more than a day or two to find them. "Alter course for Talos Prime. I'll be there shortly." Kirk stood up like a rusty mechanism, paused briefly over the sweet potato pie, and with three switch movements of a fork, shoveled the entire concoction into his mouth. "Bones, I haven't felt this lost since... Well, since Pike died. I can't shake this feeling like I'm into something way too big for me."

"Fortunately, your _crew_ doesn't care about your feelings, and between Doppelgänger and the Black Ship Affair, most of them look up to you like God Almighty. If nothing else, that means you're in, it means you've earned their respect and their loyalty. This isn't the end for you, Jim, it's just the beginning. Don't you _dare_ throw it away because you're too busy feeling sorry for yourself!"

Kirk shot him a jaunty wave and then strode out of his quarters, wearing the best facade of whisky-fueled confidence he could muster on short notice.


	2. Chapter 2

**STRANGE NEW WORLD**

Talos-IV Standard Orbit  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.39

\- 0855 hours -

Captain Kirk emerged from a packed turbolift on the bridge, momentarily lost in the shuffle as his officers performed the scheduled B-watch shift change into C-watch. Sulu and Chekov replaced Bailey and McKenna at the helm, Uhura took over the communications console from Lieutenant Moroni and Spock returned to the science console after once again relieving Lieutenant Garcia. The Captain took his command chair and waited just a moment for everyone to get situated, trade status reports with their counterparts and log in to their consoles and duty stations. Then, once he was sure the bridge was again in ready working order, asked, "Position, Mister Spock."

"We are in standard orbit of planet Talos Four, altitude eight thousand one hundred kilometers. Standard probe constellation has been deployed on schedule, proceeding to final positions in two point four minutes. Atmospheric and gravitic sensor sweeps are now becoming available."

"Archive it to the library computer for future reference," Kirk said, "Might as well complete Columbia's mission while we're here."

Ensign Chekov spoke up, "Keptin, ve are picking up magnetic anomalies on planet surface. I read as metallic mass, possibly spacecraft debris. It is in a temperate section of the planet, roughly fifty five south latitude."

Kirk nodded. "Site-point survey teams beam down to adjacent regions. Lieutenant Uhura...?"

The communications officer keyed up the intercom immediately, "Site-point away teams report to transporter room. Site-point away teams report to transporter room. Field medical teams, report to staging area."

"And I'll go along too," Kirk said, starting for the turbolift.

Spock spun in his chair in alarm, "Captain? Regulations specifically dictate..."

"Jim Kirk's General Order One," Kirk said, punching the code for sickbay as the lift doors closed behind him, "never send a junior officer on a mission I wouldn't take on myself."

Doctor Piper met him at the door without meaning to; he just happened to be standing near enough to the turbolift doors to look up from the palmcomp he'd been working on and welcome the Captain with a nod. "Sir."

"Piper," Kirk nodded back, and stepped out of the turbolift as if drawn by a change in gravity, striding between the currently un-used beds of the emergency wing. Piper fell into stride behind him and listened attentively for the question that finally drifted out of him like a bad odor, "Have there been any changes?"

"Still comatose," Piper said, "Vitals are steady, for whatever it's worth."

Kirk nodded without looking back and stopped his stride only when he reached the transparent-aluminum divider of the ICU.

Lieutenant Janice Rand was wrapped in a black mesh life support webbing that reminded him of a Starfleet wetsuit; she was strapped almost spread-eagled to an articulated medical gurney in the center of a room that contained a half dozen armatures and manipulators. The space that reminded him more of a car factory than the state-of-the-art medical expert system that it was, and Rand herself, with a dozen tubes and wires and catheters woven into the webbing and inserted into arteries over half her body, looked like the victim of a high-tech crucifixion. As he watched, the gurney she was on lifted and rotated her slightly, changing her angle relative to the floor. The armatures moved so as to keep their relative positions exactly the same with respect to the Lieutenant's body. If her wounds opened up, if she started to hemorrhage, if the tube feeding oxygen into her throat slipped even a millimeter, they would be able to sweep into action in a tenth of a second or less.

"There's been basically no change since we implanted the new heart," Piper said, "Which, I know, is frustrating but it could be worse. Frankly, Captain, the fact that she's alive at all is nothing short of miraculous."

"Is she in any pain, do you think?" Kirk asked.

Piper shook his head, and then realized that Kirk wasn't looking at him and said, "There's no awareness of it that our instruments can detect. Actually, if she was feeling anything the cortex scanners might register as 'pain' that would be a good sign too. At the moment, though, there's still brainstem activity and intermittent flutters elsewhere. It's still too early to tell."

"After two weeks, it's still too early to tell?"

Piper shrugged, "The human body is funny like that."

"I don't suppose there is any sort of experimental medical treatment you haven't tried because you don't have authorization from the Science Council or something?"

"Well..." he thought about it for a moment, "The Ilos Combine has that utility cloud thing... you know, those medical nanorobots that can supposedly repair any damage, even reattach a severed head. We could probably adapt them to work with human physiology, _if_ you don't mind starting a war in the process."

Kirk looked back at Piper brightly, "That's something worth trying though, right? Medical nanocytes? I read an article somewhere back at the Academy.."

"Nanocytes... _wow_! I would have totally never thought of that! Good thing you read an article somewhere while you were at the Academy, otherwise my eight years of med school training would have gone completely to waste!"

"Right." Kirk sighed, "Dumb question. Still if there's anything..."He trailed off, the chirping of his communicator reminding him that he had other duties to perform. Taking one last look at Lieutenant Rand's dying body, he snapped open his communicator and answered, "Kirk here."

"Atmosphere reading confirms," Spock said, "Eleven percent oxygen, sixty fifty percent nitrogen, nine percent argon and a mix of trace gases, the largest components of which are ethane and acetylene. Atmospheric pressure at sea level is significantly higher than Earth, with correspondingly increased oxygen partial pressure. The planet appears geologically active with recent tectonic activity and vulcanism within the last five thousand years."

"Safe to beam down?" Kirk asked, getting to the heart of the matter.

"Doctor McCoy recommends limiting your physical activity on the surface as much as possible to avoid hyperventilation or other respiratory effects, but otherwise safe."

"I'll be there shortly." He took one last look at Lieutenant Rand as her bed turned her slightly, then gave a sad glance to Doctor Piper and let the old man guess his meaning.

"We probably have the most advanced medical setup in the known galaxy, Captain," Piper said, "Believe me, Sir, we're doing everything possible for her. Which is, let me tell you, alot more than we could do for her on any other starship or even back on Earth."

Kirk nodded, batted Piper on the shoulder, and marched back towards the turbolift on the other side of the emergency wing.

\- 0942 hours -

Standard survey procedure called for an initial survey party of not more than twenty four persons, exact composition of which depended on the nature of the planet being explored. A long history of planet-side calamities had taught Starfleet that the most dangerous thing you can do when exploring a strange new world is to fail to identify a hazard in a timely fashion. Solving this problem required multiple transport of multiple teams spread out over a two-kilometer area at sites carefully chosen by the transporter chief for visibility, cover, and ease of motion.

First, of course, was the scout-beam report, and Kirk arrived in transporter room one just as the first data was being hammered into working order by the transporter technicians. The scout beam accomplished what orbital scans and probes could not: the transporters beamed several samples of air, a few hundred cubic feet at a time, directly into a sample container in the ship's planetology lab where a battery of spectrometers and chemical sifters examined the gasses anything resembling a harmful microorganism or airborne pollutant that might prove dangerous to the crew. Similar beams reached into the crust of the planet and extracted soil samples, both from close to the surface and from deeper down, breaking them down for chemical composition and for organism content. When _still_ nothing showed up, the chief tech said "Planet lab gives a green light, Captain."

"You sighted the crash site yet?"

"Yeah, we've got some good visuals. The wreck seems _mostly_ intact, some scattered debris notwithstanding. I've got a few choice landing sites in the area, but my favorite one is about a kilometer away if you don't mind a short hike."

"Fine with me, Chief, I could use the exercise," Kirk said, fastening his field jacket and tucking his phaser away. He waited for the rest of the away team to step onto the pad, and took the opportunity to size them up on the way. Three officers, one in a red jacket with a field operations background, the other two were bluecoats with advanced degrees in geology and xenobiology. Kirk could knew he had seen all three of them a dozen times before, but he couldn't remember their names if his life depended on it.

The fourth team member, however, needed no introduction. "Oh... Jim..." Doctor Carol Marcus - wearing a sky blue field jacket and a survey kit on her shoulder - stopped cold in the transporter room doorway, carefully considered her next words, then decided finally to retreat back to wherever it was she had come from.

Kirk grinned, "You want to tag along, Doctor Marcus?"

"I used to read about the Columbia missions back when I was a little girl. I was just thinking... well..."

"That you should tell the transporter chief that Captain Kirk _specifically_ asked you to beam down as part of the away team?"

Marcus sighed and looked at her feet.

"Well, c'mon. We don't have all day."

"Thank you, Captain," she said, stepping onto the platform.

"Oh, don't mention it. If anything goes wrong, I can use you as a human shield."

Marcus looked at him worriedly, but didn't get a chance to ask him if he was serious before the transporter beam dismantled her vocal chords.

Seconds later, the dusty arid landscape of Talos Four materialized around them as the whine of the transporter beam faded from their collective ears. Kirk found himself standing on a slanted flake of reddish brown rock under a dark grey sky in a chilly but tolerable breeze. It was dry here, but not quite a desert; humble stalks of blue alien plants like shrubs or grass sprang up here and there, like wildflowers growing on the side of a mountain. The air smelled wrong; heavy, oppressive, with an odor to it that lingered just inside the edge of his perception without giving away enough of itself for him to make a comparison. Kirk had been on enough away missions during the Academy training cruises that he knew it would take a few hours for his body to adapt to the different atmospheric mixtures, the dissolved gases in his blood thinning and thickening until his interior atmosphere was a closer mix to the exterior. Some of his colleagues had been known to developed headaches, muscle cramps or even hallucinations while adapting to alien atmospheres; no one knew what caused it or how to treat it, but to Starfleet it was just one of a thousand ways to wash out of the Academy.

The rest of the away team was nearby, distributed around the immediate area on separate landings where the transporter chief had found ground level enough and wide enough to beam them down. Once they took inventory of one another, Kirk took out his tricorder and scanned about for anything he could use for a direction fix. He knew from orbital scans that Talos Four had no magnetic field, so he waited for the tricorder to squawk it's locator signal and be answered in turn by the squadron of orbiting probes Enterprise had already launched on arrival in orbit. In a matter of seconds a symphony of measurements and triangulation pinned down the team's position, and finally the device's sensor screen gained a small green arrow that indicated the direction of True North.

"This way," Kirk said, and the team followed the sound of his voice as he climbed, carefully, over the jagged collection of rocks and boulders to the edge of what turned out to be a small crater at the top of a hill. To the north, as promised, a mild rocky incline covered with reddish-brown soil, sloping into a sort of dry riverbed maybe half a kilometer below. There was another much larger hill or plateau on the other side of the riverbed, like a vast mountain range that had been rolled flat by a cosmic steamroller. He could not yet see it with his own eyes, but the tricorder was picking up metallic debris from the plateau, eleven hundred meters away, half-buried at the end of a shallow ditch that could only have been carved by a thirty thousand ton starship making an un-controlled landing. "That must be it," Kirk said, pointing into the distance. But pointing like this solidified in his mind the geometric arrangement: it was a kilometer and a half as the crow flies, but six hundred meters downhill and then six hundred meters up again. "Let's get going, this is gonna be quite a hike."

"It's not so bad," Doctor Marcus said, "Feel that gravity. Point four gee. Reminds me of the old home."

"You from Mars, Doc?" asked Ensign Carstairs, the team's geologist, "I thought you were British or something."

Marcus smiled, "My mother was a terraformer. We used to go hiking at the family home in Hesperia Planum. The terrain was like this, but a lot harder. The only difference is the atmosphere. The air here is pretty thick."

Even thicker than Earth, Kirk suddenly remembered from Spock's report. The tricorder gave an air pressure around four times normal Earth pressure. The thick air and low gravity would probably make for some interesting aerobatic maneuvers if he could just find a stunt glider and a descent runaway to launch it. "Don't exert yourselves too much in this air," Kirk said, "And if you start hyperventilating, breathe into your jacket sleeves."

"Easier said than done, with this two kilometer hike to the crash site," one of the officers - a stout Japanese girl with a remarkable array of ear piercings - grumbled. Loud enough to be heard, but not loud enough to be taken as a serious question.

Kirk answered it anyway, "First away mission, Ensign?"

She seemed briefly alarmed by suddenly having the Captain's attention, but for the moment she pretended to be distracted by the effort of keeping her footing over the rocks and boulders and answered, "Yes, Sir. Why do you ask?"

"Well, the crash site is close to the end of the ridge over there with no clear ground. To the south and to the east, there's inclined terrain with soft granular surface, which is the worst possible place to beam down. To the north and west, thick vegetation and marshes with poor sight lines. _This_ location has solid ground and a good view of the terrain in the region around us."

Negala asked, "Why couldn't they beam us down in the middle of the forest?"

One of the blueshirts - Lieutenant Mavens, if Kirk remembered the name - answered immediately, "Because that's where Riley's team is beaming down. And Baskerville's people are coming down on top of a butte overlooking them, so if there's anything hiding in the forest waiting to eat us, Riley and Baskie will be the first to know."

"Couldn't they put _us_ on top of the butte? I mean, it'll take _hours_ to hike all the way over to the crash site from here."

Kirk almost laughed, but for the sake of morale decided to try the other route, "If you don't feel up to the responsibility, Ensign, I can arrange to have someone else take your place on all future away missions." He started off in the direction of the crash site without waiting for her answer.

"Sorry, Sir. Forget I said anything."

The rest of the team followed Kirk and Negala down the slope, turning an arduous climb over rocks and jagged edges into a plodding march down a twenty-degree slope covered by pebbles and sands and flakes of crumbling shale. As Kirk remembered from some of his geological training at the academy, this kind of terrain was indicative of heavy but steady erosion, probably high-winds and dust storms if the shape of the rocks was any indication. Most of the rocks were about golfball sized with a handful about the size and shape of a lemon, the rest was fine sands with a consistency of table salt, not even beach-quality sand. Rain-wind combination, he decided. Which made sense in light of the grey skies above, but didn't really explain the dry riverbed down below.

"Does anyone else hear that?" Doctor Marcus asked, second to last in the procession of descending team members. They'd been walking down the slope for almost twenty minutes by now, and Kirk had almost forgotten she'd come along.

"Hear what?" asked Carstairs.

"That whistling sound. Sounds a little like chimes, doesn't it?"

All five of them paused and listened. Without the crunching of their footsteps, Kirk heard it too. It was coming from the dry riverbead up ahead, and now that Kirk looked at it he wasn't entirely sure that it _was_ dry. What he had assumed was a stretch of fine rocks and sand was slightly discolored, more orangish and yellow than the browns and reds of the surrounding terrain, and from this distance it almost seemed to be moving gently with the breeze. Kirk took a tricorder scan of that region, and the sensors turned back an anomalous life form reading, something vast and collective, like a system of vines or bushes.

"Some kind of resonator," Negala said, looking at her own tricorder screen, "Like a cricket's wings or something. It's reacting to flowing water."

"Flowing water?"

"Yeah, there's a sub-surface water way just ahead. The ground is very porous there."

Kirk held off on comments until he saw it for himself. When the five of them arrived at the "dry" riverbed he saw that it was anything _but_ dry, and that it was not actually a riverbed. Actually it was a kind of deep ravine carved by a flowing river, ten meters deep and a dozen meters wide. The top of the ravine had been capped by what looked like a strangled network of interwoven vines and roots that had clung to the walls of the ravine and climbed just to the top of the wall, only to snake over the waterway and grow together like a natural floor. The vines had grown so thick that a layer of rocks and pebbles had collected on top of them almost like another patch of ordinary ground; yellowish leaves reached ever higher over the growing sheet of debris, covering the ravine even more completely.

Without tricorders, they would barely have known the river was there. There were few openings large enough to see past the thick nest of vines, and then it was too dark to make out anything but the cavernous walls of the ravine. The sound of flowing water below was smothered both by the overgrowth and by the musical chimes Carol had noticed earlier; the tricorder's acoustic sensors traced the chimes to a set of tall tubular structures in the middle of the vine floor that looked like stalks of bamboo.

Negala smiled when she looked at it up close, "You ever make a musical instrument out of a glass of water?"

Kirk smiled back, "Is _that_ what this is?"

"Yeah, each stalk has a different volume of water. That's why they all make different tones. Looks like the water fills from the bottom based on temperature and pressure differences."

Carstairs sighed, "Am I the only one who thinks this whole formation is too perfect to be natural?"

"Nah, it's too well balanced to be artificial," Mavens said, "Seems to me like a miniature rainforest."

"Nothing miniature about it," Marcus said, "Look around. This thing stretches for the entire length of the ravine."

Kirk checked his tricorder to be certain. He didn't mention it aloud, but judging by the acoustic readings of other similar tones, this one micro-forest system probably stretched for a hundred kilometers in either direction.

"I'm guessing the thick atmosphere and low gravity have something to do with this," Mavens said, "The water cycle here is probably very slow, so vegetation is under more pressure to stay close to where the water is. There's a standoff range for how close they can get, though. Close enough to use it, but far enough away to still receive sunlight. They all concentrate around that ideal range, and the entire ecosystem gets compacted into a sheet of vegetation half a foot thick."

Kirk said, "At least the Columbia survivors would have had a water supply. Maybe food too if any of this is edible," holding his tricorder higher, he switched his tricorder to "dynamic", using all of its sensor modes at once, and scanned back and forth in a sweep up to the to of the plateau. A scan for the airborne hormones, pheromones or neurotransmitters - the kinds of things associated with complex life forms - would ordinarily tell him where and how many survivors might still be waiting for them in the Columbia wreckage... then again, there were a million things that might throw off his sensor readings, especially at this distance.

As it stood, the tricorder picked up a momentary blip on the dyna-scan that vanished instantly before the system could analyze it. If there _was_ something out there, it hadn't been down this way in quite a while. "Map a beam-down site and we'll come back to it later. For now, let's move on."

With the low gravity, the uphill leg of the trip was even easier than the downhill. Walking up the slope actually felt _normal_ , like walking level in regular Earth gravity. By the time they were halfway up, Negala was practically skipping. It only took another thirty minutes to reach the top of the plateau, and there at the edge of the treeline the team entered an alien forest dominated by what appeared to be, not trees, but gigantic blades of grass. Each individual stalk was as thick as a baseball bat, cobalt blue from the midpoint to the tip, and packed just closely enough that you could move through them without really having to push them aside. Kirk felt like a mouse moving through a prairie, and some primitive part of him wondered if the lot of them weren't about to be attacked by a giant owl.

They moved through the supergrass into something of a clearing, a stretch of the forest where the growth was more sparse and the ground was littered with dust and metallic debris. This was the depression carved by Columbia's crash, and it was the final path for the landing parties to follow on their way to find survivors. Kirk's team emerged into the clearing almost at the same time as two others, one lead by Lieutenant Selena Baskerville and the other by Ensign Kevin Riley. Three other teams - Kirk knew - were out there somewhere, but implicit in the away mission, Spock had sent these three to even farther sites to conduct a more thorough search of the area, following Starfleet doctrine to try and identify potential hazards before they became hazards. At least one of those other teams was scouting another forest dozens of kilometers to the east, and still another was a hundred kilometers away, surveying a stretch of desert terrain in search of dangerous animal life that might be lurking in the shadows. The Starfleet zoologists of the "beast patrol" duty certainly lived charmed lives.

Riley spoke first, but was immediately cut off by Baskerville who announced, "We passed some ruins on the way here, Captain. Didn't take that close of a look, but it looked like a post-industrial town of some kind. Recently abandoned."

"How long is recently?"

"Some time in the last three hundred years. Also, I keep picking up these weird radioactive spikes on my tricorder. Traces of strontium ninety and caesium one thirty seven."

"Nuclear winter," Mavens said.

"Tail end of one. There's also traces of dilithium hydride and sodium tricobalt in the local strata. I'm thinking Columbia may have been shot down by something similar to a photon torpedo."

Kirk nodded and started off in the direction of the Columbia wreckage as he flipped open his tricorder, "Enterprise, away team. Kirk here."

 _"Go ahead, away team."_

"There's evidence of a recent military holocaust on the planet. Take precautionary measures for leftover orbital weapon systems."

 _"Aye, Sir. Now upgrading to yellow alert, sensors on short-range sweeps. Will advise. Enterprise out."_

"Captain," Riley spoke up, seizing the first opportunity he could find.

Kirk fixed his attention on him as he kept walking, "What is it Ensign?"

"We found a cemetery over by the treeline. Bodies buried in shallow graves marked with hand-made crosses."

"How many graves?"

"There were two bodies, plus a couple of crosses with names but no bodies buried. Seven in all."

Kirk paused for a moment and looked at Riley, "With their original crew complement that leaves twenty eight survivors. Any idea what happened to them?"

Baskerville said, "There's a lot of debris scattered along this channel here, but it seems like the largest chunk of the hull came down about four hundred meters in _that_ direction."

Kirk saw where she was pointing, right along the long scar of flattened vegetation and torn landscape that marked the ship's original crash site. After twenty five years, the plantlife here was only just beginning to restore itself to its original form before the crash. Or maybe, Kirk thought, the damage had been even more severe than he suspected. "Well then," he said, "Riley, take your team north, see if you can get some higher ground on top of those hills. Baskerville, head back to those ruins and take a full catalog for the archeologists. The rest of you with me. We'll check out the crash site next."

"Aye, Sir," Riley said, followed by Baskerville a moment later as both of them moved their respective teams in opposite directions.

Kirk's team fell in step behind him again as he moved on. He followed the magnetometer on his tricorder in largest nearby metallic mass, knowing this to be his destination. The closer they got, the more the evidence the ship's cataclysmic arrival became manifest until the signs were all around them: ancient remains of fallen supergrass, stalks three or four times as high and as thick as the current ones they had obviously replaced. There were ancient animal carcasses and broken shapes that looked like seashells big enough for a man to hide in. This place had probably been the edge of a lush forest at one time. An oasis if life surrounded by an oddly barren landscape; it seemed odd to Kirk, but for all he knew that was perfectly normal for this planet.

The first big chunk of spaceship debris appeared in front of them as they pushed through a patch of supergrass. A half-buried cylinder, crushed and broken and twisted about itself from the force of the impact. It must have been ten meters wide originally; Kirk thought it was probably part of the ship's warp nacelle. More debris lay scattered beyond it: pieces of support pylon broken to bits with its structural ribs exposed. Bits of hull plating were scattered about in no particular pattern, with signs that they had been pushed out of their original resting places as vegetation grew up underneath them.

Kirk became aware of the sounds of animals moving among the foliage only when he noticed their sudden absence. There had been a constant scratching and rustling of things moving about, but no real vocalizations other than low chirps and clicks that he would have associated with insects. Then they emerged from the supergrass into the lip of a shallow crater and the zone of silence around it, and there in the bottom of the depression was the mangled, twisted half-saucer of the former SS Columbia. Its registry numbers - NAR-02 - were still visible on the front of the saucer, and apart from a few missing hull plates and warped spars, the ship seemed mostly intact.

"Service module is gone," Doctor Marcus was saying, scanning the ship with her tricorder, "Must have been crushed. Starboard nacelle is off that way, so the one we passed must have been port."

"Anyone home?" Kirk asked.

Marcus quickly switched modes on her tricorder and scanned back and forth across the hull for a moment. The graph on her screen remained jumbled and indistinct, no clear markers for recognizable species. "Nothing human."

"Let's see if they left a note," Kirk said, and carefully started down into the crater.

The ship was covered in two decades of accumulated dirt and grime. The transparent aluminum viewports that remained intact were frosted over by a greenish-brown substance that seemed to have been liquid at some point but was now as solid as thermoplastic. Small, pointy yellow plants were growing out of the nozzles of its RCS thruster packs. As they got closer, a six-legged arthropod the size of a squirrel scurried past them and climbed up into an empty telescope mount on one of Columbia's sensor pallets, apparently using it as a nest. Everywhere the hull plating had been ripped away from the ship, plants and animals and fungi had managed to make their home. By now they were just a few meters from the ship, walking along the raised ring of material where the saucer had embedded itself into the soil, close enough that the overall outline of the ship was no longer possible to see.

"Huh!" Ensign Negala looked at her tricorder with one eyebrow elevated, "You know I'm recognizing some of these signatures? These are basically the same kinds of life forms down in the riverbed."

"Same planet, same ecosystem," Riley said.

"No, I mean, same species overall. You know, I'll bet most of the life forms here are hydrophilic."

"Water seekers," Kirk said, remembering the concept from his Academy classes. He'd never seen such a life form in person before, but on dry arid planets like Vulcan or Ancient Mars with slow water cycles it had been observed that some ecosystems had evolved a set of highly advanced adaptations specifically for the task of finding, collecting and consuming liquid water. "The hull probably traps some of it in pockets," Kirk realized, "Lot of nooks and crannies for it to hide."

Kirk reached over the slight rise in the ground and put one hand on the Columbia's aging hull. The metal felt grimy and rough, but cool to the touch even in Talos' chilly breeze. He got the sense that this ship had been alone here for a very long time. Abandoned by its crew if not entirely forgotten. In some ways, this was as much the grave of the starship Columbia as it was for the men and women who died in the crash.

Kirk's communicator chirped. He snapped it open just as Negala started to say "What the hell is that?" but didn't manage to ask her for clarification before Riley's voice flowed out of his speaker, "I'm picking up a power source in the hills to the north, Captain. Also detecting life form readings in the same direction."

"Probably the survivors we're looking for," Kirk nodded, "That'll be our next stop." then he looked up, "Problem, Negala?"

"Sir?"

"You just said 'What the hell is that?'"

Negala's eyebrows rose, "I _did_?"

Kirk stared at her for a moment, wondering where to go from here. Then he sighed and snapped open his communicator again, "Which way are those life form readings?"

"Zero one six from your current position, sir," Riley said, "We're seeing what looks like a path or a road or something over that way, that'll probably take us straight to them."

"I think I can see it too," Kirk said, looking to the electronic approximation of north. It was off to one side through a break in the foliage near a large, long fragment of Columbia's warp nacelle. If it _was_ a road, it was wide enough to drive an Argo all the way through the super-grass forest. "How far to those sensor readings?" Kirk asked.

"About three or four kilometers, Sir."

"Meet us on the road north of the crash site. We'll make temporary camp, and then both teams will proceed together."


	3. Chapter 3

**THE CLIMB**

Talos-IV Surface  
Southern Hemisphere (55S, 147E)  
Stardate 2261.39

\- 1220 hours -

Three cases of field gear materialized in a rough circle in the center of the dirt road and Captain Kirk moved quickly to collect the cases and move them off to the side. Riley's team had already secured a camp site of sorts, a clearing in the tall supergrass wide enough to enclose all three away teams without their backs being immediately against the vegetation. Together they stacked the cases in the center of the clearing and began methodically unloading them to set up the camp; fold-out chairs for six people, medical kits and science kits, and the football-shaped emitter coils of the camp's protective forcefield curtains. The case also contained a pair of inflatable habitats each with their own airlock and life support system, but these wouldn't be used unless they were planning to stay here for the long term.

Lieutenant Mavens and Ensign Riley planted the shield generators on their tripods in a circle around the camp. Doctor Marcus, meanwhile, started helping the others unload the small ration packs from the case and distribute them among the landing party. The rectangular plastic cases were sub-divided into smaller rectangles that encapsulated separate entrees, like a Japanese bento box in miniature, and in most cases even the same kinds of foods: golden rice, tropical fruits from a half dozen Federation worlds (carefully selected for their vitamin balance), grilled salmon or broiled larish or hard boiled katarian eggs for protein, and Vulcan plomeek salad or Andorian tubers for iron. Doctor Marcus took a box that included grilled sashimi and Tellarite wheatgrass and sat down on one of the folding chairs. She found the button on the corner of the box with a pictogram of plate with steam coming out of the top; she pressed the button and held it for five seconds, and a little light next to it turned red and the box stared to vibrate in her hand. After a few moments, the light turned green, the box stopped vibrating and Marcus opened it to find her food freshly cooked or chilled (whichever was better for that slot) as if it had come fresh out of the kitchen of any corner store on Earth. She was thanking providence for the ingenuity of Starfleet engineers when a faint electronic crackle, barely at the edge of human perception, announced the activation of the forcefield curtain that would protect the camp from any unwelcome surprises. Talos Four was a peaceful world so far, but they knew from experience just how quickly that illusion could be shattered.

Lieutenant Baskerville sat by the edge of the field curtain, scanning the surrounding forest with her tricorder making interested noises and writing notes in a palmcomp. Captain Kirk waved her over to join the others, but she either ignored him or didn't notice. He finally cleared his throat to make a tone of voice just short of an order, "Miss Baskerville. We'd appreciate it if you could join us."

The Lieutenant looked up, saw that she was the only officer on three away teams that wasn't sitting down for lunch, then scrambled over to collect a ration pack as her face started to turn red. She grabbed a box with Katarian eggs and plomeek salad and sat crosslegged on the ground, ignoring the chairs.

Kirk let his away teams get comfortable first, listening to the half-interested banter as they settled in. Most were just content to eat and reflect, the others - Riley and Mavens in particular - talked in whispers, continuing a private conversation that had probably started back on the ship. Kirk waited until he was sure they were well into their packs when he raised his voice at last, "So. What do I tell my travel agent about Talos Four?"

"Nice little planet," Ensign Negala said, "It wouldn't be my first choice for a colony mission, but there are worse places to get shipwrecked."

"Seems like there was a civilization here once," Kirk said, nodding at Lieutenant Baskerville, "Might still be a remnant somewhere. What kind of life form would we be looking for? Humanoids?"

Baskerville shook her head, though still seemingly lost in thought over her meal kit. "Malacosts. Crustaceans, basically. That seems to be the dominant class of land animal in this region."

Kirk nodded, "I noticed most of the animals we've seen are sort of insect-like."

"Crabs or lobsters would be a better comparison. The ruined city we observed on the way here had a number of shallow pits with coverings that were probably water chambers for residents. So they'd probably resemble some type of freshwater crab, only significantly larger."

Doctor Marcus shrugged, "We haven't seen anything like that around here. Not even bodies."

"Right..." Baskerville went back to staring off into space, preoccupied with something. When she spoke, it was almost as if she was talking in her sleep, "I mean... right. We'd _remember_ if we had, right?"

Kirk shrugged, "One would think."

"I wonder if they're good with cream cheese," Riley blurted out.

Five sets of eyes turned on him in equal parts disgust and amusement. "Jesus, Kevin!"

"I'm just sayin'. Assuming the chirality of their amino acids is similar..."

"To boldly eat what no man has eaten before!" Kirk said, intoning dramatically. "Which reminds me, somebody better check in with the beast patrol. I'm sure they've cataloged the local predators by now."

Baskerville unfolded her legs and stood up slowly, "I'm on it, Sir," and snapped out her communicator as she walked to the edge of the shield curtain so the lively chatter wouldn't interfere with her communicator.

"I did beast patrol for a shift once," Marcus said, "Never again."

"Sounds like a story there," Kirk asked.

Marcus nodded and opened her mouth to begin what was sure to be a very entertaining personal anecdote when Lieutenant Mavens shot a verbal photon torpedo directly down her throat. "I bet you've got _lots_ of interesting stories from when you worked for Section Thirty One."

Marcus' jaw snapped shut, and all three landing parties stirred as if someone had just banged a giant gong next to their heads. Kirk felt the sudden need to stand up and pace and realized it was only because of the giant can of worms Lieutenant Mavens had just dumped over his head.

"I know how this is going to sound," Marcus said, "But I don't actually _know_ much about Section Thirty One's operations."

Mavens snorted, "Nobody does. _Especially_ the people who work for them. That's how they operate.

Kirk nodded in agreement, "They trick people into doing their dirty work, sometimes without them even knowing it. Hell, the Council isn't even sure Thirty One is a real organization. It's probably an alias for something else."

Mavens grunted, "Like the Graviton Society."

"Or Terra Prime," Ensign Negala added, "They do all seem to have the same agenda."

"I don't think that's true. I think they're interrelated to some degree, but I'd be surprised if they're actually linked that way."

"It would be easier if they _were_ ," Mavens said, "Fewer leads to chase. But the situation's probably more complicated than any of us imagine."

Marcus smiled at that thought, "I do have a story. I'd almost forgotten this one. I'm _swearing_ you all to secrecy, by the way."

The group of them pulled in a little closer, some scooting chairs in where they could hear better. Seventeen Starfleet officers now formed a loose knot around a stack of field equipment that stood as a placeholder for a campfire. Even Lieutenant Baskerville pulled in closer so she could hear the story while her palcomp downloaded the patrol reports from Enterprise.

"Around five years ago," Marcus said, "We were sent to this little planet in the Tenebia sector. A place called Parva. The species there were amphibians. Pre-warp civilization, but used to dealing with aliens. Very _very_ intelligent people. When we arrived, we found that the populations of several of their major cities had all suddenly vanished. _Millions_ of people were missing, gone without a trace."

"What ship were you on at the time?" Kirk asked.

"The Defiant."

"Oh... Captain Augustine's ship. Bonaventure class?"

"That's the one." Marcus went on with her story, "We checked out the ghost towns for a while, found no clues. Then one of the cities went quiet while we were in orbit and we managed to get there within minutes of the disappearance. We actually got a couple of survivors out. They told us this crazy story about slimy meat creatures wearing plastic masks grabbing people and pulling them into the ground. We even managed to get some images. The descriptions were pretty accurate."

Mavens shuddered, "Slimy meat creatures that pull people into the ground?"

"The creatures were kleptomorphs. Mimics, basically. They were trying to imitate the shapes of the Parvans and doing a terrible job of it. Once they realized we were involved, they tried imitating humans too."

Kirk asked, "Were they indigenous or invaders?"

"We never did find out for sure, but considering their level of technology I doubt they were indigenous. The thing is, we couldn't figure out where they were attacking from. We knew they were using something like a transporter beam but there was no sign of a ship or a station in orbit, and the energy signature from the beam was barely detectable. We eventually figured out that they weren't orbiting the planet, they were _inside_ it."

"Underground?" Negala asked.

" _Deep_ underground. They'd hollowed out a space in the lower mantle, just above the planet's core. They were using a powerful subspace field to keep the cavern stable. _Perfect_ hiding place."

"This is a Section Thirty One story," Kirk said, "So I presume this did not have a peaceful resolution."

Marcus frowned, "Remember how I said they tried imitating humans?"

"Oh, hell," Ensign Riley stiffened, "Did you guys get boarded?"

"Bloody hell, _yes_. Beamed right through our shields in the middle of a shift change. And the crazy thing was we didn't even know about it until we started seeing these horrible-looking _things_ roaming the hallways in bad imitations of Starfleet uniforms. They looked like somebody had stuffed a halloween costume full of raw veal and stapled a kabuki mask to the head. Best we could tell, they were actually a colonial organism, which meant that the mass of the whole was much smarter than the individual parts. Anyway, they snatched twenty six crewmen from the Defiant, including myself. Seven were killed by the creatures. Dissected, dismantled, skinned alive. _Meticulously_ deconstructed. They were trying to figure out how to imitate us better, I imagine. Our first officer beamed down with a small security team, broke the survivors out of the labs, planted spatial charges near their main generator. Collapsed the mantle right on top of those awful things. The Parvans never had trouble from them again."

"Never heard of any kind of alien like that before," Mavens said, "I mean... fortunately, I guess. Still, that's a first-contact scenario, and you responded by killing them all?"

Doctor Marcus shrugged. An unapologetic, matter-of-fact shrug, a gesture that meant simply _'it is what it is.'_

"And you're comfortable with that?" Kirk asked.

"That's the kind of work that Section Thirty One does. Well, _did_. As an organization, it was Starfleet's admission that not every problem has an ideal solution. You should never let your morals prevent you from doing what is _necessary_."

"But how do you know that killing those aliens was _necessary_?" Riley asked.

"I _don't_ know," Marcus said, "In fact, in hindsight, I doubt if it _was_. We had assumed the creatures were incapable of communicating with us, but that couldn't have been true of the overall hivemind. Once we were in their lair, communications should have been possible. That, at least, would have been my recommendation if it had been up to me."

"Which it wasn't," Kirk said.

"No, it wasn't. I'm just glad they got to us in time. I was just a handful of minutes from having one of those things tear my skin off and try to squeeze inside it like a suit..."

"Only thing is," Kirk went on, "I reviewed your service record after the Black Ship Incident. There's no reference in there to you having served on the Defiant."

Doctor Marcus smiled, "That's because you have the service record for Doctor Carol Marcus. I used a couple of aliases when running my father's errands."

"Well since Thirty One is basically scattered to the winds, you want to be a good sport and tell me a few of them?"

"Depends on the mission. When I'm playing a civilian, I go as Elizabeth Shepard or Alexandra Holmes. My only Starfleet alter ego is Doctor Janet Wallace."

"Do you still have some of your shady back-channel contacts from your black ops days?"

Marcus' smile was barely perceptible. Just a slight uptick in the corner of her lips, a gesture that spoke a thousand words even if the only word that came out of her mouth was, " _Maybe_."

.

\- 1349 hours -

The sun was getting low on the horizon. Kirk recalled from the orbital survey that the planet turned on its axis once every sixteen hours; it had been midmorning when they first beamed down, but now it was closer to twilight and fading fast. Kirk looked at his tricorder for a time reference and briefly considered working out a time conversion for Talos-Four's rotation. Then he gave up on the idea and decided it would be easier to just run a timer on his communicator so he would at least know how much daylight was left.

They were back on the twenty-five-year-old trail of SS Columbia's surviving crew. Riley led the way, scanning ahead with his tricorder for signs of life form readings in the foliage around them. Just twenty paces down the wide path he paused as exactly that crossed his scanners, and he pointed on reflex with his free hand as a multi-legged creature the size of a billygoat scuttled across the path and disappeared into the overgrowth off to the side.

"Friendly critter," Marcus said, barely breaking her pace.

"Not _too_ friendly, I hope." Kirk took his phaser in hand and set it for a light stun setting.

"As a general rule, most non-sentient lifeforms try to avoid contact with unknown species. That also includes predators."

"There are a lot of exceptions to that rule," Kirk said. He had in mind not less than a dozen separate incidents in which he had narrowly escaped becoming the lunch of some very aggressive alien predators. The prospect of running into _sentient_ predators - like the Klingons, the Kzinti or the Varkolak - was undoubtedly his worst case scenario.

And yet as they walked another ten meters down the path, Kirk glanced over his shoulder just in time to see yet another long-bodied multi-legged creature scurry across the path and vanish into the overgrowth. He wasn't sure if it was the same creature or something similar, but the fact that it wanted to cross the path but didn't want to be seen doing it gave him some confidence that it was probably not going to try and eat one of them.

Deeper into the forest they came to a fork in the path, with the wider road meandering off in some random direction and a narrower path leading up the hill towards the encampment at the top. At the corner of the intersection, a low flat shed or shack of some kind was in the advanced stages of decay next to an old F1 shuttlecraft that was covered in old vegetation and climbing vines, probably not having flown in decades. The survivors must have left it where it had crashed: one of its hatches had been forced open and never closed again, so the shack that was setup next to it was undoubtedly some kind of temporary shelter. Beyond the shuttle and the shack, the path became steeper and rougher; bizzare tangled plant roots stuck out of the dirt path and wrapped around each other, metal bits of debris stuck out of the ground like old dinosaur bones. There was evidence at the top of the path that some old structure had once stood there, only to be destroyed, partially rebuilt and then left to decay again. It was anyone's guess what any of this had once been.

Kirk kept his phaser in hand and let Riley keep the lead. "You got any new readings?" he asked, following the younger Ensign up the hill.

"We're getting closer. Fifty meters now, just up this slope."

"What are these metal fragments in the ground?" Negala asked, pausing to look without slowing the others down.

Lieutenant Baskerville answered from the back of the group, "Cast iron. High carbon content."

"You think the survivors made it?" Kirk asked.

"No idea," Riley said. He was paying closer attention to the path, which was getting narrower the closer it came to the top. Then he realized, "Actually, this looks like a fence or maybe a railing of some kind."

"A railing?" Baskerville moved to the front of the group and scanned with her tricorder. There was, in fact, some regular spacing of the metal fragments and most of them at this point seemed to be in bars or posts of some kind that had been broken by a combination of weather and time. The path veered sharply to the right along a nearly vertical wall of light brown rock. The little metal bits sticking out of the ground veered around to follow this path, as if the path itself had given shape to whatever sort of structure used to be here.

"Starcase," Marcus said, suddenly.

Kirk looked back down the path they had come and suddenly he saw it too. "Yes! That's _exactly_ what that is!"

Riley looked back in the same direction, staring for a long time when he didn't immediately see it. "I'm not sure that I..."

"You see where these metal bars would have been if they were still upright?" Doctor Marcus knelt down next to one of them, "Some are still sunk into the ground. They're regularly spaced. If you put some decking or a catwalk between them, these would have been the supports to a starcase leading all the way up the hill."

"Hey, you're right," Riley looked down the path, then back up to where the remainder of the path lead finally up to the top of the hill. He frowned at this point as he realized, "But where does it lead to? I mean, it doesn't go all the way to the top."

Kirk nodded, "It stops where the path turns. By that rock wall there. Maybe it used to go all the way up before?"

Doctor Marcus shook her head, "There could be something else here. Do you mind if I look around, Jim?"

"Be my guest. Negala, stay with Marcus."

Ensign Negala moved out of the group with the others - separating herself from the column they had become - and leaned against the rock wall with Doctor Marcus. "Aye, Sir. Doctor, what _exactly_ are you looking for?"

"Any sort of artifact or cultural debris that might tell us what was originally at this location..."

Kirk didn't hear the rest. Riley was leading their column up to the end of the pathway to an opening at the top of the hill where the group of them were greeted by two very friendly sights. Another Temerand F1 shuttlecraft was parked in a clearing just out of the way of the obstruction, although this one was in far better condition than the one at the bottom of the hill, polished and functional with evidence of recent repainting of its insignia. Beyond that, across a small grassy area surrounded by a square of white flat stones, was a large corrugated metal structure adorned with a huge printed sign that read "Talos City" printed on top of the corporate logo of the Temarand Corporation. Looking around, Kirk saw the entire perimeter of the hilltop was ringed by long, skinny houses like mobile homes encircling patches of vegetable gardens, fruit trees, herb planters, and small sheds of odd designs that probably contained animal pens.

There were no _people_ here, not at first. He heard the distant thumping of footfalls from one of the buildings and voices that were muffled but not hushed. _Possibly awkward,_ he thought to himself, _They haven't noticed us, so now we have to introduce ourselves and scare the hell out of them..._ Then he saw, to his relief, a movement at one of the doors of the big building as someone started to come out of it, saw his group standing there, then rushed back inside in a hurry. He heard slightly muffled voices from inside, a short but confused argument that he imagined could be summarized as _There's people out there! People we don't know! People like us!_

"Big smiles, everyone," Kirk said, and then stood still and waited.

There was a brief commotion from inside, then the door swung open and two older gentlemen emerged from the building wearing light brown coveralls that had been patched a few too many times. They both seemed well-groomed, healthy, and utterly relaxed like a couple of old musicians on a Sunday afternoon. Both of them stopped a few paces away from Kirk's team and one of them said, "Hello there. Can I help you gentlemen?"

Kirk put his phaser back on his belt, then stepped forward and covered the gap between them with an outstretched hand, "Hi. Captain Jim Kirk, Earth Starfleet." Only once the old man accepted the handshake - Kirk thought, a little wearily - he went on, "We intercepted your, uh, distress beacon in deep space. Or actually, it intercepted _us_. We came by to see if anyone survived the crash."

"Really!" The old man folded his arms and almost laughed, "Captain Victor Hernandez, formerly of SS Columbia. This is Ted Haskins, New Horizons Corporation Colony Division. I don't seem to recall having _launched_ a distress beacon..."

"Well," Kirk shrugged, "It's been twenty five years, plus you probably had a lot on your mind at the time." He looked around at the camp for a moment, making his best to look impressed, "I take it everyone survived the crash okay."

"Not everyone," Hernandez said, "Five were killed in the crash, two others from injuries a week later. Aside from that, we've been in remarkably good health here."

Doctor Haskins asked in a faint Scottish accent, "It took you twenty five years to investigate the crash of our ship?"

"You were the last Earth ship to even _visit_ this sector of space. We just happened to be passing through on our way to the Eagle Nebula."

"Seriously?" Hernandez really did laugh this time, "That's a two-year trip at maximum warp."

"Not for the Enterprise," Riley said, "She's a flagship, one of the newest in the fleet. We can get to Eagle and back in under two months."

"Hm..." Haskins nodded, "Time marches on... Well, I suppose you're here to evacuate all of us."

"Why? Do you _need_ to be evacuated?"

Haskins laughed, "Good question! As you can probably see, we've been on our own for a long time here, I think we're pretty comfortable as is. It's become a home to us here. Can you understand that?"

Looking around for a moment, Kirk nodded. More people were coming out of the big building to get a glimpse of the spectacle, and he could even see eyes and faces poking out of windows in the long houses and their doorways. He couldn't help but notice that a considerable number of the new spectators were children, many of them older teenagers. "I understand perfectly," Kirk said, "Just as you probably understand that I do have a duty to perform here and I can't ignore it."

"I don't know Starfleet procedure in situations like this," Hernandez said, "I mean, could we maybe petition for..."

"We'll just need to look around a bit, size things up," Kirk kept his voice gentle, hoping not to alarm either of the old men, "I have to make sure you're not in any _immediate_ danger and can take care of yourselves. Otherwise, I just report your position to the Federation and a new colony goes on the map."

From somewhere a few paces behind the two men, a small but incredibly sharp female voice burned out of the crowd, "And what if they decide we _can't_?" someone else among the spectators quickly hushed the dissenter, but seeing that Kirk had noticed anyway the speaker pushed to the front of the line and stared at him defiantly.

The question wasn't directed at him, but the asker wasn't backing down either. She was a younger woman, probably in her early twenties, with dark hair and light brown skin and a smoky exotic look around in her eyes that Kirk half doubted was natural. Fit, confident and beautiful, she could have made a career as a swimsuit model in any planet in the Federation, and if her singing voice was anything like her speaking voice she could probably headline in any club on Risa. It was only the fact that she was glaring at him with a look of suspicion and barely-concealed contempt that kept Kirk from falling in love with her on the spot, and even that was _barely_ enough. "If we decide you can't _what_?" Kirk asked, prompting the challenge.

The beautiful girl stepped into the open, revealing her slender form under a form-fitting, thigh-length blue dress that showed off two smoky-brown immaculate legs. This time Kirk really _did_ fall in love with her. "What if Starfleet decides that we can't really take care of ourselves after all? That it's too dangerous to stay here?"

"You misunderstand me," Kirk said gently, "My job isn't to find out _if_ you're in trouble. My job is to make sure you're _not_ in trouble. The only reason we'd remove you from this place is if we found something here too dangerous for us to handle. And believe me," Kirk grinned, "There's not much that we can't handle."

"Oh, you're a big man, aren't you?" The girl smiled a bitter, angry smile, "Big tough Starfleet man here to save his damsel in distress..."

"Ricca, for crissakes!" Hernandez turned to her in a full body a _What the hell is wrong with you?!_ gesture. The beautiful girl seemed to get the message and slipped back into the group of spectators in the big triangular building. "Sorry about her, Captain..."

"Little history there?" Kirk asked, lowering his voice, "Bad experiences with Starfleet?"

"We're calling it Talos Syndrome. It affects three quarters of all the children born on this planet. Symptoms include cynicism, individualism, impulsiveness, curiosity, and a pathological hatred of authority figures."

It was at this moment that James T. Kirk decided he had just met his future wife. "She's your daughter, isn't she?"

Hernandez flinched, "How'd you know that?"

Kirk shrugged, "It figures. Just my luck, you know?"

"I don't think I follow you..."

"Don't worry about it." Kirk slapped the old man on the shoulder and then turned back to the rest of his away team, "Alright, gang. Standard spot check. Full physicals on the natives, check the plants, check the animals."

"Water sources?" Riley asked, pointing back down the slope, "We saw that river down there..."

"There's a well over on the other side by the fabricator," Haskins said, pointing his arm in a hook-shape to indicate the other side of the triangular building, "Just a heads up, the purification system probably isn't up to Federation specs."

"We'll make sure it _is_ before we leave here," Riley said, and gestured for the rest of his team to split up around the camp while Baskerville did the same.

"So," Kirk started walking towards the triangular building - and the crowd of spectators with the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen hiding among them - and gestured for Hernandez and Haskins to come with him, "Twenty five years, right? Fill me in on the details."

Haskins put his hand on his shoulder and Kirk suddenly felt an electric jolt of tension shooting through the man's arm. In that instant, any hope of this mission being a routine colony check vanished forever. "I'd rather talk about this in private," Haskins said, "Don't want any more interruptions."

"I _like_ the interruptions," Kirk said, turning slowly, "Helps me keep my perspective."

"I don't think that would be appropriate, Captain."

Kirk smiled, and without looking shouted, "Hey, Ricca!"

From within the building, the girl shouted back, "What do you want?"

"History lesson. Tell me everything you know about this place."

Haskins suddenly looked annoyed, which Kirk found puzzling. But when he looked at Hernandez, just for a moment, he saw a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, as if Kirk having any contact with Ricca was a recipe for disaster. _Bad experience with Starfleet,_ Kirk wondered, a slim but real possibility. But not quite as plausible as the alternative, _Or something he doesn't want her to tell me._ Of course, it could have simply been that Hernandez had noticed Ricca's affect on Kirk and simply didn't want his daughter to be left alone in the company of a strange man from another planet who simply couldn't resist looking at his daughter's _fantastic_ legs.

But that would have been way too normal for a place like this.

Ricca came out of the metal building in her sensational blue dress, smiling like a professional chess player in a roomful of amateurs. She'd probably spent the last few years dreaming of an opportunity like this, called over to speak candidly by someone in a position of power who didn't have any kind of authority to punish her for her honesty. "What do you want to know, _Captain_ Kirk?"

 _Good god_ was she adorable! "You can call me Jim," Kirk said, smiling warmly, "Why don't we start with a tour?"

Ricca looked at him dubiously, "You didn't call me over here just to show you around, did you?"

"I ask your dad or the doctor and they'll just show me all the safe places. _You_ know where all the fun is."

She shrugged, sure that there was a joke in there somewhere but not really understanding what it could have been. "Well, let's start with all the _boring_ places. Get those out of the way first."

"Yes. Let's."


	4. Chapter 4

**THE MAGISTRATE**

Talos-IV Surface  
Unregistered Settlement "Talos City"  
Stardate 2261.39

\- 1405 hours -

Ricca's tour was as thorough as her horrified father's might have been, and to Kirk's lack of surprise there wasn't actually that much to show for a fledgling town with with only a few dozen residents. The big triangular building was "the School" and it was exactly what it sounded like. The single massive cafeteria space was used for every conceivable public gathering that Talos City could ever need, but with the holoprojectors in the ceilings and floors, lab work stations against the walls, replica skeletons and plants and animals hanging from the rafters and in display cases all around and the touch-screens built into the tables it was clearly meant to serve primarily as a school for children. Kirk's arrival had actually interrupted part of the day's geometry lesson which Ricca was clearly happy to miss out on. She'd related to him at this time that their studies were all geared towards labor activities - fixing electronics and planting seeds and caring for animals - and complained bitterly that they weren't allowed to investigate abstractions. When Kirk asked her why that was, she responded simply "Ask the Magistrate," at which point Hernandez had a minor anxiety attack before Haskins rushed in to change the subject.

She showed him the landing area and the three Class-F shuttles the camp had restored from the original Columbia crash site. All three shuttles were functional, but their limited fuel supply meant they were only ever used in emergencies. A small shed near the school held an industrial fabricator that had been salvaged from Columbia, and the solar batteries trickle-charging its capacitors could process five kilos of material in a twenty four hour period. "We save it for the essentials," Ricca told him, "Important medicines we can't make ourselves, rare engine parts, hard-to-make tools, that sort of thing."

"You think you could benefit from a portable generator?" Kirk asked, "We could spare one of the fifty kilowatt sets. You'd have to setup a hydro cell to keep it fueled, but-"

Ricca shrugged, "If the Magistrate approves, that would be great."

Kirk smiled, again noticing the extreme discomfort this reference caused her parents. It was at least the seventh time she had mentioned it in the last hour. "Who is the Magistrate?"

"One of those authority figures the youngsters hate so much," Haskins quickly interrupted, "Ricca, I really think you should return to your studies at this time..."

"Oh c'mon, Doctor, she's doing a great job," Kirk smiled and batted the man on the shoulder again, "Besides, you've been out of the loop for a while so you don't know my reputation. _I_ don't like authority figures either."

Ricca laughed, "You're a Starfleet Captain..."

"I'm little people in the scheme of things."

"Hm..." Ricca thought about this for a long moment, then looked up at him with a coy grin to ask, "Wanna see where I sleep?"

Kirk nodded, trying his best not to sound too eager for this. A glance at Hernandez and Haskins expected to show the two men glaring at him in paternalistic rage. Instead, Kirk saw that the idea of Ricca taking Kirk to bed seemed like the _safest_ thing she had done all day.

Something about that seemed mildly suspicious.

Across from the school and the fabricator, Ricca led them through the gardens and planters that covered an area the size of a regulation soccer field. He didn't recognize any of the vegetables, although the brightly-colored and sweet-smelling fruits were superficially similar to Earth types. Haskins assured him that everything was edible and safe; Kirk saw Lieutenant Mavens moving through the gardens with a tricorder checking this for himself and nodded in agreement. The garden seemed immaculate, so well cared for that tending it had to have been a full time job. So Talos City's main pursuit was undoubtedly agriculture, probably just for sustenance.

 _So why does the Magistrate want the kids studying engineering?_ Kirk filed that question away for later.

"This is my place," Ricca said, gesturing at a long wooden house at one end of the garden. The cabin had wooden screen doors with simple spring hinges and windows with no frames or screens. Leading him inside, Kirk entered a barracks-style space with rows of loft beds overhanging wok desks, wooden lockers and shelves for personal items. Every work desk had a toolbox next to it, and every toolbox was labeled with a name. Almost all of the beds were empty at the moment, but the ones that were occupied - five out of the twenty beds in this cabin - were filled with children. "And this one's mine," Ricca pointed to an upper bed above a remarkably neat and well-organized work desk. A tablet computer was sitting there, and Kirk tapped the screen to wake it.

The screen had paused about three quarters of the way through Emanuel Zinn's _The Post Atomic Horror_. "History buff," Kirk said, smiling fondly at the book, "I always hated history."

Captain Hernandez started to say, "You were supposed to return that computer to-"

"I _love_ history," Ricca said, ignoring him, "The Eugenics Wars, in particular. You ever heard of Khan Noonien Singh?"

"You have _no idea_ how much I wish I hadn't."

"Ricca!" Hernandez was raising his voice now, "You were supposed to return that tablet! You _definitely_ didn't get permission to study military history!"

"Oh dear me, now the Magistrate's gonna _punish_ me!" Ricca feigned terror, made a big dramatic show of trembling in place. "Do they have Magistrates in Starfleet?"

"Depends on what you mean by Magistrate."

Ricca shrugged, "An omnipresent, amoral, self-important micromanaging troll who watches everything you do, everything you say, everything you _think_ , and uses it against you, just to make you do what it wants?" she glanced, ever so briefly, at Haskins and Hernandez, wondering if _they_ were about to punish her for her insolence as well. As rebellious as she was, this level of dissidence was unprecedented even for her.

Kirk considered his answer carefully on what little information he had at the moment, "We all have our keepers. _I_ have to answer to Starfleet for everything I do, that's the cost of commanding a ship like the Enterprise. _You_ have to answer to your mom and dad, which is the cost of growing up."

"My mother's dead, Jim. The Magistrate killed her."

"That's enough, Ricca," Haskins said gently.

"Why did the Magistrate kill your mother?" Kirk asked.

"Same reason he kills everyone else..."

"That's _enough_ , Ricca!" Haskins grabbed her by the arm and pulled her towards the door, "You are absolutely _not_ -"

"I want to meet the Magistrate," Kirk said as she was leaving, "Can that be arranged?"

Ricca turned from her being-dragged to shout back to him, "Think about it long enough, and it'll happen. That's how he works. Just think about-" Ricca and Haskins were gone from the barracks, crashing through the wooden door and letting it swing shut behind them. This left Kirk alone in what was technically the bedroom of a beautiful girl, with beautiful girl's visibly agitated father glaring at him angrily. _This is like DesMoines all over again..._

"So is this what you do?" Hernandez asked. His teeth were clenched, and he looked like he was close to tears, "Travel around the galaxy stirring up trouble?"

Kirk frowned, "I don't look for trouble, Victor, but somehow I always seem to find it."

"I want your people out of here by nightfall. Make your inspections and get out."

"Happy to, Doctor. _After_ you explain to my satisfaction what happened to Ricca's mother."

"Vina died of natural causes," Hernandez said, frowning, "It was traumatic for Ricca. It was traumatic for _all_ of us. This fantasy of hers about the Magistrate is... I suppose a kind of displaced anger. She blames _me_ for what happened..."

"Yeah, that makes perfect sense, Captain. I could totally see that being a valid explanation. Except that when I asked Haskins who the Magistrate was, _he_ seemed to think it was a real person. And your actions just now indicate a concern for Ricca's safety in spite of her youthful recklessness."

"Recklessness?" Hernandez looked aghast at the massive understatement. Then his disgust turned to regret as he realized exactly what his reaction signified.

"Recklessness," Kirk said again, nodding, "This Magistrate isn't someone who tolerates dissent, is he?"

Hernandez sighed, "The Magistrate did not kill Vina."

"Then where is she?"

"I don't know. And even if I did, that is no concern of _yours_! You have now thoroughly exhausted your welcome, Kirk, and now I am formally asking you and your people to leave this colony immediately."

"We'll be departing from this place when we're good and ready. _After_ I've had a chance to talk to the Magistrate."

"I'm not a moron, Kirk. You can't occupy this planet if you've been asked to leave. That's Starfleet's Prime Directive..."

"General Order One," Kirk said, "Which prohibits Starfleet from interfering in the natural development of primitive cultures or independent communities. Contrast with General Order Two, which requires me to take any and all possible action _short_ of violating the Prime Directive to safeguard the lives of Federation citizens from natural or manmade hazards. Now," he looked at the tablet computer, picked it up and tucked it under his arm, "You and Haskins have been acting funny ever since you saw my away team. And then there's Ricca, who thinks the first time she sees a Starfleet officer that we're here to force you out of your homes, and she starts talking about this so-called Magistrate, who she claims is executing people for no reason. Dozen other red flags I won't even ask you to explain. So here's your big chance to come clean, Victor. _What the hell is going on here_?"

Hernandez sighed, and reached out and took the tablet from under Kirk's arm. He started to compose a somewhat long, very thought-out answer in his head, but the beeping of Kirk's communicator caught his attention first and he decided on a simple, "Ask the Magistrate when you see him."

"I intend to." Kirk flipped open his communicator and answered, "Kirk here."

"It's me, Sir," Ensign Riley answered, "I have the site report ready, if you have a minute to discuss it."

Kirk heard it in his voice and read it between the lines. Something in the report was irregular enough that Riley wanted to talk to him about it in person. "Where are you, Riley?"

"Over by the shuttle, Sir."

"Be there in a minute." Kirk closed his communicator and looked back at Hernandez, "We'll pick this up later."

"For your sake, Captain, I hope so."

The Talosian sun was starting to dip towards the horizon by now. Talos City's children had all finished with school, and Kirk saw dozens of them moving among the garden with their little toolboxes, pruning and weeding, watering and fertilizing. Still others were moving around by the fabricator shed, putting in orders for tiny lightweight tools they needed for some job or another. A small waist-high army was at work here, supervised by a handful of older teenagers and adults at least four times their age.

Most of the other teams were gathering together near the shuttlecraft when Kirk arrived. They left room for him and Riley to meet and formed a loose circle around the two of them, using the shuttle as cover in a kind of watch formation. No one had told them to do this, they simply sensed that this environment was sufficiently unfriendly to form a defensive position here to deliver the report. Kirk felt the yellow alert in his mind upgrade to red.

"Captain," Riley said as Kirk joined the group finally, "I finished the site survey. There are seventy five people here. Thirty five adults, forty children. Food and water supplies check out, but I wouldn't want to leave them here without a proper generator. Local wildlife seems harmless enough. No recognizable hazards in the soil or atmosphere. Beyond that, they've already been here for twenty five years without any _obvious_ problems."

It was that operative word that caught Kirk's attention first and foremost. "How about a _non_ -obvious problem?"

"They've definitely got one, Sir."

That Riley hadn't called him to simply report an emergency told him that the danger was still, so far, undefined. That was possibly a good sign... Unless it was a bad sign. "Could you be more specific?" Kirk asked as a yearning from half his soul. And the other half of his soul desperately wanted to see Ricca again.

"I'm not sure, Sir... For one thing, there's another cemetery over by the treeline. Bodies buried in shallow graves marked with hand-made crosses. Forty seven in all."

Kirk did a doubletake at this, " _Forty_ _seven_?"

"Yes sir."

Lieutenant Baskerville said it before Kirk could even voice his confusion, "Columbia had a complement of forty two. Seven of them died in the crash, and most of the adults are the original crewmembers..."

"Right," Riley nodded, "So who's buried in those graves?"

"They seem to be _breeding_ at a really impressive rate," Ensign Mavens looked back over the top of the shuttle at the army of child gardeners working in the fading twilight.

"Eighty children in twenty five years," Kirk grinned, "They were fruitful and multiplied."

Riley shook his head, "We've got to ask ourselves, though, if that's all _children_ buried in those graves, why is their juvenile mortality so high? Is that something to be concerned about?"

Baskerville added, "There's no sign of malnutrition or bacterial infection. But I'll tell you one thing thing: _all_ of the girls are pregnant."

All eyes turned to Baskerville in mild disbelief. " _All_ of them?" Kirk asked.

" _All_ of them," she said again, "Of course they're all roughly the same age, but the youngest one I examined was Melena Haskins, twelve years old. She's two months pregnant."

Kirk flinched as he realized, "Ricca said something about the Magistrate."

"Who is the Magistrate?"

"I don't know, but she accused him of killing her mother, among others. Considering how crabby she is, she might just be making trouble for the local boss, but I don't think that's it..." Kirk's eyes widened as he suddenly realized, "Gravity is point four of Earth... they don't have plating indoors... Baskerville, how old do you think Ricca is?"

"The one you were talking to?" she shrugged, "She's fourteen. _Also_ about three months pregnant. Their physical development is all whacky because of the low gravity, but _if_ she makes it to adulthood, Ricca will be at least a foot taller than you."

So much for _that_ prospect. Kirk felt his heart sink into his knees at the notion, and then felt it jump into his throat as he realized, "So then, her mother is probably buried in one of those graves."

Lieutenant Mavens seemed to be turning pale as he digested all of this. "The hell kinda place _is_ this?"

kirk looked around a bit, glancing around the corner of the shuttlecraft and the nearby dormitory houses. "Riley, are you _sure_ there's nothing else up here but human lifesigns?"

Riley shrugged, "We've searched this whole campsite twice since we arrived. No sign of non-human life forms, other than the animals in the pens."

"Hey Jim!" It was Ricca's voice, calling to him from somewhere around the bend.

"Check again, just to be sure," Kirk said, and gestured for them to move. The away team disbursed as casually as they could manage and fanned out across the camp again, tricorders in hand. They had completely scattered by the time Ricca came around the shuttle and found him.

"Jim," she said, catching her breath. She didn't look like she had been running, but she looked stressed all the same, "Glad I found you. Ready to finish your tour?"

Kirk smiled joyously at the thought of this, "I'd like nothing better. Where to now?"

Ricca smiled at him, "Victor and Ted will kill me if they find out I'm showing you this."

"Showing me what?"

"A very special place. Come on." She grabbed him by the hand and lead him down the path, away from the camp and into the foliage below. In the fading twilight it was much darker than it had been during the ascent. So dark, in fact, that the two of them almost crashed head-first into Marcus and Negala, who were coming up the path themselves with sample containers hanging from their shoulders.

"Jim!" Marcus said, startled as well as delighted, "I found something interesting back there. It looks like there's some kind of structure or foundation beneath the hill, but I'm having trouble-"

"Later," Ricca said, "We're kinda late to get some place."

"Yeah, she's right," Kirk smiled, "Tell me on the way."

Ricca whirled on him, suddenly very anxious, "I was... Um... I was just want to show _you_."

"I'll order them to close their eyes when we get there." Kirk winked at her, hoping she would interpret that as a flirt, if only so he could actually see how Ricca responded to flirtation.

Whether she did or not, Kirk couldn't tell. Unhappily, Ricca gestured for him to follow and lead the three of them back down the path towards the ancient staircase, hidden in the darkness ahead.

On instinct, Kirk took out his tricorder and scanned ahead for any obstacles that hadn't been there tricorder could only scan in the direction it was pointed, so Kirk slowed his pace, took his time and panned the device through a practiced scanning arc, probing along the path in front of him and watching the readout carefully for any sign of a 'hit'. Doing this slowly seemed to annoy Ricca, who suddenly seemed to be very eager to get to her surprise on time. Kirk ignored her for a moment, his attention purely on his tricorder: Nothing registered on infrared, no radio signals, no life form readings except for the foliage around him.

Kirk switched the tricorder to acoustic mode and heard the high-pitched, barely-audible whistle as the tricorder began to emit modulated sound pulses into the air in front of it. In this mode, the device would be able to detect even the faintest sound vibrations generated by the mechanisms that made life work; the beating of hearts, the pumping of lungs, the smacking of lips or the flutter of wings. Life was made to move, and when it moved ever so slightly, the acoustic sensor could hear it. But once again, as he waved the tricorder around in a sweep along the horizon, the scanner gave him the briefest flash of a positive reading in the direction of the path bend where Marcus and Negala were leading them, and once again that reading vanished when he tried to focus on it.

It was at this point that Negala said, "For a planet with no magnetic field, that's a pretty strong reading."

"What do you mean?" Marcus asked.

"Look at your magnetometer. Mine's showing fourteen hundred nanoteslas and climbing."

"Is it really?" Out of curiosity, Kirk switched back to EM mode, switched to the same long-wave radio frequency he'd tried before and turned his tricorder back towards the shuttlecraft at the top of the hill. This time, the shuttle barely registered at all: where before it had been a distinct magnetic anomaly with significant ferrite contributions, the tricorder now registered a garbled, meaningless spike that it couldn't tell him what it was or how far away. "I don't want to alarm anybody," Kirk drew his phaser and toggled it to the stun setting. "But I think our tricorders are being jammed."

It was all he needed to say for his companions to take the hint. Doctor Marcus pulled out her tricorder and set it for ECM mode, while Ensign Negala dropped fifteen paces behind them. Kirk switched his communicator to the Enterprise frequency and spoke in a low voice, just above a whisper, "Kirk to Enterprise. Start transport of all recon teams excluding primary site, and then put the ship on red alert."

There was a brief delay, then Commander Spock's voice came over the channel, _"Is there a problem, Captain?"_

"Sudden interference with tricorders, and circumstances strongly suggest ECM. I'm keeping this channel open, be ready to beam us up immediately."

 _"Understood, Captain."_

Ricca, who had been glancing back nervously every few seconds to make sure Kirk was still following her, paused and gestured ahead, "It's over there... Who are you talking to?"

"What's over there, exactly? Something special?"

Ricca nodded, "If you want to know about the Magistrate, that's where you should look." To Kirk's lack of surprise, she was pointing directly at the strange grey-brown rocks where Marcus and Negala had stopped to search for artifacts.

Marcus whispered to Kirk, "Who's the Magistrate?"

"Whoever he is," he crouched down and looked at his tricorder again, watching the EM scanner dance and fluctuate in increasingly random and meaningless patterns, "He's trying _really hard_ to keep me from scanning him..."

"It's right here, Jim," Ricca said, gesturing to a spot near the stone wall where the path bent to the side. Marcus had marked the spot with a holo marker, painting a ghostly outline over the soil where she had figured out the ancient staircase had once been. It was almost a straight path down that ran very close to the abandoned shuttle at the bottom of the hill, and Kirk wondered if this was really a coincidence.

"What are we looking for?" Kirk asked.

"Don't you see it?" Ricca pointed to a spot on the rock face, "Here and here."

"What?"

"It's an entrance, Captain," Marcus said, seeing what Ricca had pointed at but what Kirk hadn't had time to see for himself, "This hill we're standing on... It isn't really a hill. It's a _pyramid_."

"Ah," Kirk looked down the stairway again, "Like Chichen Itza."

"Yeah, but _a lot_ bigger. That shuttlecraft down there... I think that's an actual parking space."

Kirk thought of this for a moment, starting down the stairway, "You think the shuttle landed there before the pyramid was overgrown?"

"It's not overgrown," Marcus knelt down and picked up a fistful of light brown soil from the path, "The pyramid was _deliberately_ buried. The plants and growth here were also placed here intentionally so that the hill would _look_ like a hill and not a building."

"And the colonists on top of it have no idea."

Marcus looked up at Kirk with an anxious expression. The message was written in her eyes. _Who do you think buried it?_

Ricca, who could only hear half of their conversation, asked, " _What's_ a pyramid?"

"Let me have a closer look at that shuttle down the stairs," Kirk said, "Stay close to me, Carol."

"You don't have to tell me twice."

"Wait a minute," Ricca started after them as they began descending, "You didn't get to see..."

"Ricca, you wait here," Kirk said without looking at her. Not that he could see her anyway in the falling darkness; the fading twilight was already giving way to night and the forest was blackening by the second. Kirk pulled out his tricorder and switched on its hand lamp, watching his footing for tangled roots or holes that might fall in or snag his boot and take a gash out of his leg.

He paused as he heard something moving further down the path, sort of rythmic tapping noise like the sound of a small dog running on concrete. Kirk toggled his tricorder and let the chemical sensor pull air through its particulate sensor, gathering data from the atmosphere the same way as a trained bloodhound. Immediately, the tricorder identified multiple biological signatures. Dozens of them to be sure, but only a few of them _recent_. The tricorder had already singled out his and Doctor Marcus' signatures and was now teasing out the others. One of them was a human female, the most recent of all, probably the signature from Ricca. The other two were something totally different, an unknown species the tricorder could not rec...

The other two were _human_. But there was something unusual about...

The other two were _human_. But they were too small to be...

The other two were _human children_. Nothing much unusual about them at all.

No other signatures registered, old or new. And suddenly Kirk realized that he had made a bit of an error moving through the forest using the stealthy approach, assuming there was trouble when none was to be expected. All this vegetation must have thrown off his sensor readings, and there were two children coming back from a fishing trip who didn't know he was here, so he had to find a way to introduce himself in such a way that he wouldn't scare the kids to death. _And why the hell do I have my phaser out?_ He put the weapon back on his belt holster and powered it down.

The simplest way was the best way, he decided. He gestured for Marcus to follow him quietly and continued forward, leading by his tricorder's light. Not much farther ahead, the derelict shuttlecraft came into view as a dark rectangular shape against a slightly darker background. For an instant, Kirk saw the outline of a small multi-legged creature mov...

For an instant, Kirk saw the outline of a _person_ moving out of the hatch on the opposite side of the shuttle vanishing, from view into the folliage. "There they are," Kirk said, and glancing back at Marcus said, "Scan around, see if there's anyone else lurking around out here." He left her to follow him from a short distance and climbed down towards the shuttle, sliding between the tall green stalks of the supergrass and the hidden thorns of knee-high plants to get to the shuttlecraft.

The hatch had been forced open the same way he remembered it. Kirk raised his hand to knock on the side of the hull, but paused when he heard the sound from inside it. It was the sound of someone crying. A girl, probably.

Kirk tapped on the hull and asked in a firm but not too loud voice, "Excuse me. Anyone home?" he poked his head around the curve of the doorway and answered, "Captain Jim Kirk, Federation Starfleet. Anyone home?"

"Starfleet?" answered the shuttle's sole occupant, curled up on the dirty floor of the shuttle compartment in that same ostentatious short blue dress. Or at least, he _thought_ it was the same. The woman on the floor was much older and more delicately built than the pubescent powerhouse that had been Ricca Hernandez, despite the uncanny resemblance. She could have been an older sibling or an aunt. Or she could be...

"This is certainly unexpected," her eyebrows jumped slightly, "You're _young_ for a Starfleet Captain."

"So they tell me," Kirk said, taking a moment to look her over. The resemblance was too hard to ignore: even with the difference of years, even with streaming from her bloodshot, tired eyes, she was _still_ a breathtaking woman in almost every way that Ricca was. Which, Kirk knew, left very little doubt as to her identity. "Are you feeling alright?" Kirk asked.

"Yes, fine. Just... you know, _lonely_." The woman sat up and looked at him with eyes full of hope, "I suppose that will change now, after today."

"If you're lonely, why don't you go back up the hill with the others?"

She flinched, " _What_ others?"

"Hernandez and Haskins. And," he hesitated slightly, "Ricca. If you are who I think you are, she's been missing you terribly."

She started to stand, then settled back to her knees again as if the weight of her thoughts was holding her down. "There are no others... they..." she blinked, her mind seeming to be racing, "There never... were..."

"When's the last time you were up there?" Kirk asked.

She went on as if she hadn't heard him, "No... they wouldn't... they _couldn't_. They're not clever enough for _that_?"

"For what?"

She looked up at Kirk with fresh tears welling in her eyes, "I um... I have reason to believe, Captain Kirk, that my memories are being tampered with."

Kirk believed her. He opened his communicator and keyed it to the away team's general frequency, "Kirk to all teams. Does anyone have eyes on Captain Hernandez or his daughter?"

 _"This is Negala. Sorry, Sir, I looked away for a couple seconds and she was gone. I don't see her anywhere, and I haven't seen the Cap-"_

 _"Captain, this is Riley,"_ the Ensign's voice sounded both tired and urgent and slightly strained, and Kirk realized that Riley had suddenly broken into a run in the middle of speaking, _"Sir, I have eyes on two creatures moving down the walk path, heading for your position! Decapod-types, roughly one meter in height! One of them has a phaser! I'm in pursuit! Take evasive action_ now _!"_

Kirk pulled back from the shuttle hatch and looked up towards the not-so-ancient stairway, fixing on the most likely path a hostile force might take to attack him. Decapodal aliens armed with weapons would stand out like...

Decapodal aliens armed with weapons would...

Decapodal aliens armed with...

 _Shit._

 _What was I looking for again? Why can't I remember?_

"What am I looking for?" he asked.

"Decapods?" the woman answered, "That's what your guy said."

Kirk jumped at the sound of her voice; for a few seconds, he'd forgotten she was there too. Then he was delighted and then impressed and then overjoyed to see her in that exciting blue dress, then very confused as to why she seemed to be curled up on the floor with tears in her eyes. _Strange._ "Decapods?" Kirk felt his hand twitching at the holster for his phaser and a sense of unease almost overwhelmed him. "Kirk to Riley..." he raised his communicator again, "What... Uh... what is it you just reported a moment ago?"

 _"Yeah... I... I don't remember, Sir... Oh, I... yes, now I remember. Doctor Haskins sent two of the children down the hill to bring you something. They should be reaching you in a moment."_

Kirk nodded and closed the communicator. Then he turned back to the woman on the floor, who seemed by now to be deep in thought again. Something was troubling her, though Kirk couldn't imagine what. "I don't think I caught your name, Miss...?"

"Divina Hernandez," answered the woman, "My friends call me Vina."

"Do you live in this shuttle by yourself, Vina?"

"Yes I do. Ever since the crash." She narrowed her eyes and looked directly at him for a long moment, "Wow, guy, you are _really_ attractive."

Kirk raised a brow, "Am I?"

"Yeah, you are." She held out her thin, smooth hand and invited Kirk to take it, "Wanna have a go?"

"What?" Kirk squinted at her, "Are you feeling alright?"

"No," she reached down to the waistband of his trousers, feeling for his belt, "I'm really not. And I've had a hell of a day, so could we just cut to the chase?"

"Vina," Kirk grabbed her hands, held her at arm's length, "What the hell's the matter with you? What's going on here?"

Vina laughed and looked up at the ceiling as if she expected to to find a surveillance camera there. "Make up your mind, asshole! Am I being rewarded or punished?" She waited for a long moment, expecting something to happen. Then after a moment, when nothing actually did, her eyes darted over to Kirk and her look of amusement changed to one of horror, "Jesus, you're _real_ aren't you?"

Kirk laughed, "Last time I checked..."

"You need to leave. Get off this planet. _Now!_ Before the Magistrate finds you!"

 _Again_ with the Magistrate. And it occurred to Kirk that Vina didn't seem to be aware of the colony on the top of the hill, just as the colonists didn't seem aware that Vina was living in the shuttle. Her own daughter thought she was dead...

Her daughter...

Ricca...

Kirk drew his phaser before he remembered why. He'd asked Negala if anyone had seen Ricca or her father and Riley had sent him a warning about two armed creatures coming down after them. And moments ago, Vina had said something about her memories being faulty... "What the hell just happened?"

If Vina answered him, he never heard her reply. A light from the path behind him caught his attention and he saw Doctor Marcus coming down the path now with two small children just behind her. "Over here, Carol," he called to her, and started to turn his attention back to Vina.

"Hey Jim," Marcus called out to him, "The twins were looking for you out there," She turned back up the path where a pair of small children were descending, "Ella, Emma. This is Captain James T. Kirk, my commanding officer."

The girls with Doctor Marcus had Kirk's full attention for reasons he couldn't immediately explain.

They were a trio of creat..

They were a _pair_ of creat...

They were a pair of _twin girls_ carrying phaser rif...

They were a pair of twin girls carrying _oversized tricorders_ under their arms, following behind her in short, careful steps as if they were shuffling their feet. Marcus had introduced them from left to right, though dressed identically and with identical haircuts, Kirk couldn't tell them apart anyway. His immediate impression was that Ella was imperceptibly shorter and thinner than Emma, but beyond that, he took them as a a pair of half-grinning flat-browed wide-jawed somewhat androgynous and surprisingly creepy girls. Creepy in the way of reddish brown, long-legged _things_ like giant hermit crabs staring at him with baseball-sized eyes...

Kirk rubbed his eyes tiredly. Where in the world did _that_ visual come from?

" _You're_ an interesting one," said Ella. Or was it Emma? Hard to say which of them was speaking because as far as he could neither of their lips were moving. "An excellent specimen."

"Leadership qualities," said the other twin, "Strength of will. Intelligence. Resourcefulness."

"And physical health as well. The female too. I think they are perfect for our needs."

"I think so too. Even Vina seems to think so. Isn't _that_ interesting?"

Kirk felt a series of alarms going off in the back of his mind. He sensed the danger, even though he couldn't tell where it was coming from or what it looked like. On instinct, he raised his phaser and squinted into the darkness, looking for a threat he wasn't sure was there. "Carol," he heard himself say as if in a dream, "Get down..."

There was a flash of light and a blast of heat, and Kirk felt but did not really process the impact of a phaser bolt against the middle of his chest, striking with the force of a racehorse's well placed kick. He tumbled backwards down the slope of the hill-that-wasn't-a-hill, tumbling head over heels over brush and deposited rocks like a piece of wood falling down a flight of stairs, with Doctor Marcus tumbling down right behind him. In the distance he heard phaser pulses firing out from two different directions, undoubtedly from Negala and Riley's teams in quick reaction to whoever it is who had attacked them.

The phaser pulse had partially scrambled his nervous system, but more importantly in the last few instants of consciousness it shocked some part of him into sobriety to realizing, as he apparently knew good and damn well, that the things those two giant crab-things were carrying were _not_ oversized tricorders but were, in fact, EM75 phaser rifles from the armory of SS Columbia.


	5. Chapter 5

**RELIABLE WITNESS**

Talos-IV Standard Orbit  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.39

\- 1430 hoirs -

Spock strode into the transporter room just as Riley's team materialized on the pad and waded through a cloud of paramedics to reach the Ensign instantly. As he knew from their dustoff call, Riley was the only one of them that wasn't wounded in whatever it was that was going on down there, but the message was so garbled and confused that that was the _only_ thing Spock knew for sure. Now as the four of them materialized, Kevin Thomas Riley stood next to a trio of starfleet officers covered with burns and scrapes, as if all three of them had spent most of the afternoon trying to negotiate a Tandarian minefield. Baskerville's team, now recovering in sickbay, had looked much the same, but Lieutenant Bakserville herself hadn't managed to remain standing when she materialized on the pad.

"Report, Ensign!" Spock demanded, almost shouting the order directly into Riley' chin.

"Some kind of tribal warriors, Commander. They're using the hilltop as a fortified position. Dozens of em down there, some armed with old-style phaser weapons. It's probably some kind of armed band of survivors leftover from the old wars."

Spock raised a brow, "What old wars are you referring to?"

"The old wars... the... um... you know, the nuclear exchange that must have devastated this planet. All over the place down there we saw evidence of some kind of holocaust. Ruined cities, empty roads, abandoned spaceports. The whole planet's like that, Sir. No civilization left, just savages."

Spock opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it. "What about the survivors?"

"There _aren't_ any survivors! It was all some kind of trap! The Captain and Doctor Marcus were both separated in the crossfire!"

"You know that for a _fact_ , do you?"

Riley nodded emphatically. "I _saw_ them, Commander! The Captain and Doctor Marcus both took one in the chest, center of mass. Negala's position was taking heavy fire. I could hear her screaming when they overran her position."

"And what of the colony on the top of the hill?"

"It was a trap. Some kind of illusion. It was never really there."

"I see..." Spock walked over to the transporter console and started busily working the controls, "Ensign, I want you to prepare a full report with as much detail as you can recall. I want it on my desk in one hour, no excuses."

"Yes, Sir... what are you doing, Sir?"

"I am attempting to locate Ensign Negala and the remainder of Captain Kirk's team."

Riley flinched, "I just told you, Sir, they're dead! I _saw_ it!"

"I heard you clearly, Ensign."

"What, you don't believe me or something?"

Spock looked up at him and stared him straight in the eye, partly searching him to gauge his reactions, but mostly to hammer home his words so there could be no misunderstanding, "No, Mister Riley. I do not believe."

"I'm not lying, Sir..."

"Obviously."

"But you still don't..."

 _"Enterprise, away team! Enterprise do you read!"_ It was Ensign Negala's voice, of course. The sound of phaser fire screamed in the background behind her, firing in long crackling beams instead of the short pulses usually associated with autofire.

Spock answered the signal himself, "Away Team, Enterprise. We read you."

 _"Requesting emergency beamout! We're under heavy fire! Get us out of here!"_

"Standby, away team," Spock locked the transporter sensors onto Negala's position, immediately isolating all four communicator signals and the biosigns around them. The sensors detected nothing else in the area around them, yet Spock immediately noticed that all four of them had fallen into a circular defensive formation, using a small depression as cover. "Beam them aboard," he said to the transporter tech, and seconds later the beam energized on the now-empty pad. Four of them materialized out of a crackle of swirling yellow lights, none of them as injured as Riley's team but all a bit worse for wear. Spock noted with puzzlement that Lieutenant Mavens and Ensign Carstairs were also present, but still no sign of Captain Kirk or Doctor Marcus. "Report, Ensign!" Spock demanded.

Negala jumped down from the pad, still working residual adrenaline out of her system, "This whole thing was a setup, Sir! They took the Captain and Doctor Marcus! We're _all_ in danger if we stay in orbit any longer!"

Spock folded his arms, "I don't suppose you could tell me the exact nature of the danger, Ensign? Please include as many details as you can recall."

"Yes, Sir. Uh... the planet is populated by a warlike race. Multi-legged, kind of like hermit crabs, only a alot bigger. Their shells are metallic or ceramic, I'm not sure which. They're divided up into armed bands. Very volatile. They shoot first and ask questions later."

"And it was one of those armed bands that attacked you from the hilltop north of the wreckage?"

Negala nodded, "Yes, Sir."

"How many were there?"

"Sir?"

"Exactly how many creatures attacked you?"

"Forty seven altogether. Moving in squads of seven or eight."

Spock nodded back, considered this sagely. Then he called to Ensign Riley before he could leave the transporter room, "Ensign, a moment of your time."

"Sir, you said you needed a rep-"

"Do you agree with Ensign Negala's account of these events?"

Riley looked slightly offended, "I take it you actually _believe_ me now?"

"That was a 'yes or no' question, Miser Riley."

Riley sighed and walked back over to the transporter console, next to Negala, and clearing the doorway so the paramedics could truck the wounded off to sickbay. "Yes, Sir. That's exactly how it happened."

"Even the details? Forty seven attackers?"

"Forty seven, Sir. Had to be."

"Moving in squads?"

"Six squads, Sir... Um..." he thought for a moment, "Two were hanging back. Not part of the action. The others were..."

"Fascinating." Spock stared off into the distance, momentarily lost in thought.

"I don't care if you don't believe me," Riley said, "I saw it clear as day!"

"I'm sure you vividly _remember_ everything you've reported to me, Ensign. What I am _not_ sure of is how you are able to relate that information in such precise detail."

Negala raised a brow, "We're _trained_ to observe details, Commander."

"Let me rephrase that," Spock folded his arms, "Who was it that attacked you, exactly?"

"Like I said, an armed band of crab-like aliens that were using the the hilltop as a fortified position."

"How do you know that?"

Riley did a doubletake, "What are you asking me? I saw them with my own eyes!"

"You saw _what_ , Ensign? Did you actually _see_ a, quote, 'band of armed warlike aliens using the hilltop as a fortified position,' numbering exactly forty seven crab-like creatures, moving in squads, with two squads not part of the action? _Or_ did you see a hostile force of unknown strength and origin using the hilltop as a firing position, motivations and reasons unknown? Please be clear on what exactly it was that you _observed_."

"I... uh..." now that Riley thought about this, it was a bit peculiar to him too. Starfleet officers were trained to observe details, that much he knew. But not the kinds of details _he_ had observed, and not nearly that quickly. He remembered the fight, and he remembered the details of the fight, but the details were somehow divorced from the flow of the memory itself. He simply knew it; they were incontrovertible facts. "I'm... I'm not sure, Sir... I just... I got the impression that... well..."

"That there are no survivors on Talos Four," Spock said, "That our coming here was a deception, engineered specifically to lure our away teams to the surface where they could be ambushed or captured. And that you were driven from this planet by a tactically superior force in an act of unprovoked hostility."

"Yes, Sir. Exactly right."

"Ensign Negala," Spock turned to her with an icy gaze, "I take it you also have a strong impression about exactly what happened on the planet surface? Namely, about who attacked you and why?"

Negala suddenly stood bolt upright, "The 'why' is they want to study a human specimen. They lured us here with a false distress signal and they captured the Captain when they had the opportunity. The crash and the survivors were never really there. They created an illusion that was precisely tailored to our... our... preconceptions..." she thought about this one very carefully, and then her face darkened, "I... don't have the _slightest_ idea how I know that, Sir."

Spock fished into his belt and snapped open his communicator. "Spock to bridge."

 _"Sulu here."_

"Mister Sulu, Move the Enterprise into a standoff orbit, forty thousand kilometers altitude. Maintain yellow alert status, all decks. All senior officers convene in conference room in thirty minutes."

 _"Aye, Sir."_

Not that Riley couldn't guess, but he was compelled to ask anyway, "What am I missing here, Commander?"

"Your recollection of these events," Spock explained, "Contains a great deal more narrative than observation. What little you have observed is also _inconsistent_ with that narrative. Your body language and speech patterns are indicative of human baselines for rote memory recollection rather than visual-spatial reconstruction. Put simply, you are remembering something you _know_ , not something you _witnessed._ "

Riley took a small step back, "You think it was all some kind of... hallucination, Sir?"

"Or a posthypnotic suggestion, something of that nature," Spock said, "I will search the library computer for similar cases. It seems evident, however, that _both_ of your memories have been tampered with. Our next step will be to objectively verify ground conditions independent of witness testimony, reliable or otherwise."

"Why would someone tamper with our memories?" Negala asked, "And _how_ could they do it so quickly?"

"I don't know, but for the Captain's sake it shall be our top priority to find out." He turned and swept out of the room without bothering to officially dismiss either of them and stormed around the corridor to the nearest turbolift. The doors opened for him just as he felt the barely-perceptible distortion in the ship's gravity, as if the ground he was walking on had become a treadmill adjusting to his every move. Inertial dampeners, he knew, probably a half-impulse burn from the feel of it. And arriving on the bridge seconds later, Spock saw the same for himself: the navigational HUD on the port side of the bridge showed Enterprise's rapidly changing orbit as an expanding elipse around the blue-green disk of Talos-IV. From their present position it would take over an hour to reach the periapsis of their new orbit, but if nothing else it would quickly bring the ship out of range of whatever weapons the Talosians might still posses. "Mister Sulu," Spock said as he took the command chair, "Prepare a battery of probes to survey the planet's surface and orbit. Compile a detailed survey of all complex life forms on the planet surface and any sign of intelligent life, past or present."

Sulu looked back at him incredulous, "That will take some time, Commander. At least a couple of days."

"Then I suggest you begin immediately, starting with the area in a one hundred kilometer radius of the Columbia crash site."

"Aye Sir..."

Lieutenant Uhura left her station for a moment, casually leaned down over the side of the command chair to ask, almost in a whisper, "Jim?"

"Missing. Probably captured."

"How? By who?"

"I don't know, but I intend to find out. Inform all senior officers to prepare for a situation briefing..."

"Spock, aren't you worried, though? About the Captain?"

"I am concerned for his safety and for the potential alien threat to the Enterprise-"

"No, I mean... I mean his state of mind. You know he's been been depressed ever since the Doppelganger mission. This isn't exactly a good time for him to be taken hostage by an alien force."

Spock turned to look her in the eye, but didn't immediately comment on it. It was something he'd been keeping in the back of his mind for the time being, at least until the vastly more empathetic Doctor McCoy had had a chance to wrestle the Captain out of whatever rut he'd fallen into. On a personal level even Spock couldn't help but worry, but on a more professional level, he felt more confident than ever. "If you think about it, this might be just the sort of thing that will snap him out of it. It is not the whole ship at risk anymore, it is only himself and one team member. He'll be free to employ his full mental faculties without being weighed down by responsibility, and that will help him regain his confidence."

Uhura looked dubious, but still hopeful. "I hope you're right..."

Spock turned the chair back to the viewscreen as the disk of Talos IV vanished in the setting sun. "So do I."

\- Early morning (Or is it evening?) -

They called him The Keeper. That wasn't his real name, of course, and technically he didn't qualify as a "he" in the human sense of the term. The humans of Talos City knew him as The Magistrate, and a generation ago they had known him as The Librarian. In fact, throughout his life he had had dozens of names and titles, all consistent with his present occupation or some occupation he intended to convince others that he had. He had forgotten what his real name used to be, in that special way that the people of his race forgot _everything_ that used to be. In fact, the worsening epidemic of what he had once called "creative forgetting" was one of the many things that he had somehow managed to forget.

His companion's name was The Watcher. It had been his name for a long time, as he was disinclined to do much of anything else. The two of them - together with their essential and aptly-named counterpart The Dreamer - stood before a transparent barrier that sealed a large holding cell, nearly forty feet wide by sixty long, containing no furniture except for impeccably smooth padded walls and floors. Within the cell lay three prone figures, scattered in no particular arrangement, about where the Keeper and his companions had - with considerable effort - managed to drag their unconscious forms. Theirs was one of just a dozen cells built into the sides of a long cavernous menagerie, a warehouse for exotic species plucked from every part of the Orion Spur. Unlike this cell, the other enclosures held living and active specimens, some of whom had long begun to suspect their captivity, others of which were still blissfully ignorant. A few of those cells presently held the decaying remains of corpses that the Talosians had not bothered to dispose of; the cell adjacent to the humans presently held the mummified remains of an Andorian fighter pilot who had spent most of his captivity sitting, meditating, mentally and physically silent until he finally starved to death.

It was not the first such tragedy to visit this place, and it probably would not be the last. _"We have detected a large space craft in orbit of our planet at the moment,"_ said the mind of the Keeper, speaking in a mental language that only his companions could hear or understand, _"It is similar in many ways to the Columbia, but is far larger, and of a more sophisticated design. It is already beginning to alter its orbital path, possibly an attempt to move beyond the range of our influence."_

The Dreamer said, _"That means we are dealing with a significantly greater force than we originally believed, Keeper. This is unacceptable."_

 _"I disagree with the Dreamer,"_ said the Watcher, _"We have planted in the minds of the other humans a memory of combat and dread, one they are apt to retreat from in the future. In my opinion, it is likely they will depart without further action."_

 _"We cannot be sure what their reactions will be,"_ said the Keeper, _"The one thing we_ can _be sure of, however, is that these two are wholly unsuitable for our needs. While they are more adaptable than the Workforce, we find them much less pliable in terms of memory and perception manipulation. I also point out that these individuals have no knowledge of our prior dealings with the Federation. That confirms something we have always suspected about the nature of our arrangement."_

 _"You're implying they intend to interfere with the development of the Workforce,"_ said the Dreamer.

 _"Should they become_ aware _of the Workforce,"_ the Keeper said, _"They will be compelled to intervene."_

 _"Then we haven't much time,"_ The Watcher turned slightly, projecting an image of the orbiting starship into the minds of his companions. The image was crude, unfocussed, extracted from a sensor device on the Columbia wreckage that the Watcher had once tricked Captain Hernandez into repairing for him, _"We must focus their attention on the recovery of their captain and dissuade them from investigating the broader context of his capture."_

The Dreamer considered this carefully for a few moments, _"For a while, at least, we can limit their reactions through simple manipulation..."_

 _"Yet they have the power to destroy us all before they realize what they have done. They have already moved into a higher orbit beyond the reach of our electronic influence."_

 _"But beyond the reach of their primary weapons as well,"_ added the Dreamer, _"We have some time to decide what to do with them. It is my opinion that we should arrange for the placement of their corpses on the surface so their comrades can recover them and leave."_

The Keeper shook his head, _"They would still seek revenge. Like most colonizing aliens, they are likely to devastate the entire surface of the planet to avoid the appearance of weakness. No, we must first provide in their minds a scenario satisfying enough to warrant their departure without further investigation."_

 _"We will need Vina's help,"_ said the Dreamer, _"and perhaps one or two of the others."_

 _"No, we must limit their contact with the Workforce to avoid any unnecessary complications. They already have grounds to doubt the reality of their prior experiences, and as they have already seen Vina, the risk there is negligible..."_

Within the menagerie, one of the humans began to stir, Kirk slowly beginning the arduous climb back to consciousness. "A failed experiment," the Keeper said aloud as the idea came to him.

The Dreamer looked at him in puzzlement, _"I don't understand."_

 _"We will create a maze for them to solve. We will allow them to struggle, resist, and eventually win their freedom. This will leave them with the belief that they have thwarted our efforts and will depart, decisive and victorious. No further action will be necessary."_

 _"Is this really less complicated than an illusion of stranding and rescue?"_

 _"Given what they have already seen of us, such an incident would only stoke their suspicions, perhaps leading to an armed incursion with the intention of subjugating us. This alternative plan will replace suspicion with certainty and a sense apprehension. They will never return, because they will believe they know all that they need to know about us, and their fear of us will mitigate their curiosity..."_ The Keeper felt a pair of eyes upon him, and sensed recognition from one of the humans. Captain Kirk had become conscious, and was now sitting upright in the enclosure, staring at him.

\- 1940 hours -

Kirk didn't recognize the species. They kind of reminded him of Terrestrial hermit crabs with their long, segmented legs and the large complicated-looking cases on their backs that looked like giant mechanical seashells almost as tall as his shoulder. The round beady eyes mounted on moveable stalks rose from a flat, wide head that just barely protruded from inside their shells, and it was immediately obvious that the shells themselves were artificially created and specifically designed to accommodate the Talosians' unique anatomy. He couldn't read anything about their facial expressions - he wasn't entirely sure where their faces _were_ \- but somehow he could sense that they stood tall and proud with an air of superiority that was at once arrogant and intimidating.

The crab-creatures were standing on the other side of a thick transparency. It divided him - and the room he was in - from the remainder of this facility. Some form of captivity, like a terrarium or a cage, furnished only with dark grey mats on the floor and walls and the still but slowly-reviving form of Doctor Carol Marcus.

Kirk got the sense that there were other cells in this menagerie, but he couldn't see them or their occupants clearly. For the moment he focussed his attention on the three aliens directly in front of him, took a moment to size them up and assess his situation. His Starfleet training was still fresh in his mind: when captured, his first and overriding priority was to determine the strengths and weaknesses of his captors, determine their physical and biological abilities and assess further threat to the rest of the crew. In essence, his duty was as to interrogate his captors as much as possible even as they tried to interrogate him. He had to concentrate, keep his wits about him, remain relentless in his search for clues, vigilant for any chance to turn the tables.

And when he was sure he had their full attention, he said, "My name is James Tiberius Kirk, Captain of the Starship Enterprise, representing the United Federation of Planets. My vessel is on a mission of exploration, our intentions are peaceful..."

None of the aliens spoke aloud, but Kirk heard the voice echoing in his mind, a jarring impression halfway between an hallucination and a memory, _"It appears, Keeper, that the intelligence of the specimen is shockingly limited."_

 _"This is no surprise since its vessel was baited here so easily with a simulated message,"_ replied another voice, equally disembodied. Somehow Kirk could tell the origins of these voices, one for each alien, though he could not entirely tell them apart, _"As you can read in its thoughts, it is only now beginning to suspect that the survivors and crash site were a simple illusion we placed in their minds."_

Telepaths, obviously; the last time he had experienced something like this had been a brief mind-meld with Spock on Delta Vega, though this seemed much more direct. But something about that comment bothered him. He _had_ suspected that something about the survivor's encampment was hidden or illusory, that something unseen had staged the entire situation to look harmless when it was really anything but. The uneasy feeling of unreality about this situation hadn't extended to the people living there.

But if that was true, then his perception of the camp and his conversations with Haskins, Hernandez and even Ricca had all been figments of the Talosians' collective imaginations. Were they really telepaths, then, or just gifted teleprojectors? There was an easy way to find out. "You're not speaking, but I can hear you... what am I hearing?"

 _"You will note the confusion as it reads our thought transmissions."_ thought the Keeper.

It didn't completely answer his question, but it was a clue. It was enough to know his captors could not completely tell what he was confused about. Another test was in order, "Telepaths..." he paused and thought for a moment, "You can hear my thoughts, and I can hear yours. Now, unless you want my ship to consider this abduction to be a hostile act..."

 _"You now see the primitive fear-threat reaction,"_ thought the Keeper, _"The specimen is about to boast of his strength, the weaponry of his vessel, and so on."_

Not telepathy, Kirk realized, not completely. They could read his emotions and instincts, but they could only guess at the actual content of his thoughts. Their guesses were pretty accurate too, but it was in the subtle ways they were _in_ accurate that was the most telling. Since as only Kirk knew - and evidently the Talosians didn't - the boast was intended to speak of his crew's persistence and resourcefulness, not their brute strength.

But a boast is a boast if one is only reading emotions. The Talosians had sensed his pride, and evidently had a low opinion of human civilization. And come to think of it, there was an even easier way to test their limits: Kirk clenched his fists and thought with intensity, _Those puny little bug-things, they make me want to kick this glass wall really hard with my left foot..._

 _"Next, frustrated into a need to display physical prowess, the creature will throw himself against the transparency."_

Kirk fulfilled the prediction as he knew he was expected to: instead of kicking it, he lowered his shoulder and rammed the clear panel separating himself from the three aliens, with all the frustration they'd sensed in him.

The Keeper's mouth opened and closed in a soft, snapping motion, an expression of satisfaction that his prediction had again proven accurate. And in an instant of control, Kirk forced himself not to feel satisfaction of having _his_ guess vindicated, and focussed instead on the frustration that knowing this didn't really help him come up with a plan. Presently, he said, "You had to put me in here somehow. That means there's a way out of here, and I'll find it eventually."

 _"Despite its frustration, the creature appears more adaptable than our specimens from other planets,"_ said the Keeper, _"We can soon begin the experiment."_

Kirk stared at the three of them, letting his sense of surprise palpate the cell. It was something else he now understood about his captivity: he was being studied, examined, and probably compared to other species somewhere in this Talosian zoo.

But as the three of them turned to depart, Kirk was struck with a sudden thought, almost a flash of inspiration really. As a non-telepath, humans lacked the capacity to _accidentally_ sniff out the thought transmissions of telepathic species. This meant the Keeper - whatever he was up to - had intentionally allowed Kirk to hear what he was communicating to his two companions.

It was merely a curiosity now, but it was one Kirk kept close in his mind. _Why do the Talosians want me to know this is an experiment?_

\- 1940 hours -

"Ah, Doctor Danar," Spock said as she entered the room. She was only two and a half minutes late to her first and probably last high level staff meeting on the Enterprise, and yet this slight tardiness earned her a half-sarcastic, "I am pleased you were able to fit this command briefing into your duty schedule. Please have a seat."

Danar wasn't sure if he was joking or not. In fact, she couldn't completely be sure if he was _grinning_ or not. There was something strangely aloof yet bitingly intense about this Vulcan, like a man who insisted on adherence to rigid protocol only because he found the violations thereof secretly amusing. The others in the room were all perfectly normal and familiar-archetypes she'd worked with for years as a psychoanalyst-except, of course, for Lieutenant Keenser, the diminutive Rigelian with his natural armor plating who'd taken over the damage control center in the past few weeks.

It dawned on her after an awkward pause that Commander Spock was expecting an answer. She stammered finally, "Yes, Commander, thank you..."

"Your thanks is not required, Doctor, as you are the resident expert on xenopsychology and telepathy."

"And also telekinesis and telepresence, though primarily in non-human life forms..." her attention was drawn to the images flowing on the monitor screen in the middle of the table, showing what appeared to be a playback of the away mission on the planet surface. "This is the away team recording?"

Spock nodded quietly. "I admit, it is difficult to believe."

"I'll say..." Ensign Riley wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't seen it himself, but the tricorder record was right there for all of them to see. The tricorder carried no memory of an attack on Talos City or the methodical house-by-house massacre of its residents. It did, however, record the sudden appearance of a dozen crab-like aliens in the camp, each brandishing an EM75 phaser rifle in their forelimbs that looked like they had been modified to better fit into the aliens' hands. The creatures all wore large metallic shells that covered most of their abdomens above their long, segmented legs. "They were jamming our sensors so we didn't get a lot of data, but a picture is worth a thousand words. They had us seeing and believing exactly what they wanted us to see." And remembering too, Riley thought. He hadn't even properly recalled _where_ the attack took place.

Spock spoke up again as the recording came to a conclusion and started its playback a second time, "This, in addition to the fabricated memories of the away team, leads me to believe we are dealing with a hostile force of telepathic life forms, their number and intention so far unknown. As the available facts are limited, I will invite speculation based on the information we have, hopefully to construct a rescue plan for the Captain and the other stranded crewmembers."

Keenser - running the playback from his engineering palmcomp - froze the image to show one of the Talosians in frame. He stared at it for a moment, the shallow bulbs of his eyes darting back and forth, and then smiled and remarked, "Their shell composition is primarily stainless steel, galvanized with a layer of zinc and powdered aluminum. There's quite a bit of weathering on the surface, so they're probably very old."

"That figures," Riley said, "Hermit crabs on Earth migrate from one shell to another, sometimes even using old beverage containers for shells. These things probably recycle old shells generation after generation like we do with clothes."

"It's no wonder they disguised themselves as children when they went for the Captain," Negala said, "They're the right size and shape for it."

"But not the right _mass_ ," Keenser added, "Their exoskeletons and muscular structure contain large air-filled cavities, probably to save weight. Much of their structure seems to be supported by compressed air alone. As such, their bodies may be _extremely_ fragile."

"Not everyone can have hardened exoskeleton that can scratch a diamond." Scotty batted Keenser on the shoulder, almost as if to illustrate the point as his hand made a distinct 'thumping' sound as if he had just slapped the side of a rock face.

Spock nodded sagely, "Indeed, this can be taken as an indicator of the limits of their telepathic abilities. Whatever image they project must be in some way derived from on reality."

"Are we conceding the point that these _are_ telepaths we're dealing with?" Doctor Danar asked, "I mean, this could occur just as easily with drug-inducement or posthypnotic suggestion."

"The former would have appeared in Doctor McCoy's post-mission exams," Spock said, "And the latter is not corroborated by our instruments, despite the fact that the contradiction of their memories is _well_ documented."

Scotty asked, "But how does this tell us anything about their limitations? I mean, they tricked four Starfleet officers thinking they were human children..."

"...instead of simply turning themselves invisible or disguising as trees or something," Doctor Danar said, "It seems to me this technique is a form of working-memory manipulation. They can't just create images out of whole cloth, they use selective modification of sensory input while it is still being processed in the forebrain."

"In which case," Spock said, "they would have created memories of a similar nature but of different details for the away team members who _did_ , according to our tricorders, witness the aliens opening fire on Captain Kirk's team."

"Right. They can't _erase_ that memory, but they can probably suppress it for a short period of time and then _modify_ it to suit their purposes. The modified working image is transcribed to long-term memory as a simulated experience. Give you an example. You see a shuttle crash. They can't make you forget what you saw, but they can trick you into misinterpreting the details, like changing the design of the shuttle or changing the identity of the pilot, or changing the circumstances so that the shuttle was rammed by something that caused it to crash. Also, they couldn't hide the existence of Talos City, but they _could_ alter the memories of the away team to make them believe Talos City had been an illusion all along."

"Fortunately they can't seem to control exactly how the new memories develop," Negala said, "Half of us thought the city was an illusion, the other half thought the city had been massacred before we got there."

"And they could make us all believe that the Captain was dead," Riley added, "So they can retcon our memories, but they can't edit for consistency."

"Precisely," Spock said, "And your recollection about so-called 'Armed bands' attacking your position is probably a holdover from your memories of Nibiru and Doppelganger. The one thing we have going for us is that the Talosians cannot seem to accurately project or read memories beyond primitive emotions."

"That gives us a margin to work with," Danar said, "Especially since they can't manipulate our instruments. The problem is, obviously they can manipulate our _reading_ of those instruments. You might walk past an entire city filled with Talosians and then immediately forget it was there."

"More likely, you'd believe you've just seen a _ruined_ city, abandoned for centuries," Uhura said this as she played through another part of the recording, this time from Baskerville's tricorder, replaying her inspection of the infant-care nursery - not less than twenty infants in evidence - where Bakerville had recalled seeing only disused industrial equipment. The 'empty' water pits that had once been used as Talosian residences had actually been crowded with living Talosians who somehow seemed as oblivious to her presence as she had been to theirs. "Question though," she asked as it suddenly occurred to her, "If this is memory manipulation, how can they change your perceptions in real time? I mean, for that to happen they'd have to be able to consciously process and manipulate your perceptions before _you_ do."

"They made Kirk believe they were human children," Riley added, "How could they do that unless they were, what, hacking his optic nerve?"

"The associative centers of the brain feed back into the frontal lobe's working memory centers," Spock said, "as a result, there's a disassociation between seeing an object and interpreting it. The Captain may see them exactly as they are, but is being compelled to _imagine_ them as something else."

"Let's talk strategy, Commander," Lieutenant Sulu stiffened in his chair, drumming his fingers on the table, "The only other thing we need to know is how to avoid being manipulated long enough to rescue Kirk and Marcus. We know they can read our emotions and some of our thoughts, but there's got to be a range limit to their abilities, right? You said line-of-site transmission?"

"It depends on the mechanism," Danar said, "With pheremonic telepathy they'd have to be very close, within a few meters, possibly within physical contact. Neural-electrical induction usually requires physical contact, but under some rare circumstances can occur at a greater distance. We're probably dealing with a combination of the two, a kind of pheremonic hypnosis with an inductive element."

"Meaning?"

"Well if I had to guess, I'd say they need to make initial contact with the subject to introduce the necessary pheromones, neutralizing some higher brain functions, and then use neural-electric induction to stimulate the affected cortical system. It's similar to Vul-" she shot a glance at Spock, "Uh... There are similar cases on record."

Spock nodded and blew right past Danar's attempt at discretion, "Vulcan marriage rituals _do_ use a similar practice. An exchange of neurotransmitters during sexual intercourse can allow two spouses to communicate telepathically over extraordinary distances."

"Wow..." Uhura hung her head, suddenly having an answer to a question she didn't know she'd had.

"Little too much information, Commander," Sulu grumbled. Then he looked up, "Wait a minute... You're saying Vulcan spouses are telepathically linked after sex?"

"Yes," Spock said, "Sometimes _permanently_ , depending on the intensity of the-"

"It...uh... seems to me," Danar interrupted before the moment could become more awkward than it was, "They probably can't manipulate more than a few people at a time. Assuming we're dealing with a small number of individuals, there's got to be an upper limit to how much information they can communicate at a given time."

"Based on what?" Spock asked.

"There was a pretty long delay between the times both away teams contacted the ship. I believe both teams were manipulated separately, using the combined mental powers of all three Talosian infiltrators to affect team members a few at a time. It might even take _several_ Talosians working in concert to alter the memories of a single individual."

"If that's true, then the battle plan is strength in numbers," Sulu said by way of making a conclusion, "Since they can only affect a few of us at a time, we go in teams of twelve or more, keeping visual contact and regular reports. We use tricorders and sensor drones to verify everything we see and do with a third party command post. Believe nothing you see or remember unless the control section confirms it."

Uhura shook her head, "The verification is the weak link. They can just as easily make you _think_ you've been verifying your status the whole time. Whoever's in the control section would be sitting there screaming into a headset wondering why nobody's listening anymore."

Sulu thought about this for a moment and then nodded sadly, "Yeah, I guess..."

"What about a remote-controlled craft?" Scotty asked, "We could rig a shuttlecraft or a probe to make a low pass of the crash site, reconnoiter and have a look at what's really down there. This way we can be certain that at least we have accurate information about the layout of the crash site."

"Theoretically we can get that same kind of information with the ship's sensors," Spock said, "Or at least we _should_ be able to. Our probe surveys and sensor scans have returned very confused readings, and obviously the Talosians are using some mechanical means to obscure our instruments."

"They're probably using Columbia," Riley said, "I mean, they attacked Kirk with an old phaser rifle, and they didn't seem to have any weapons or technology of their own. They probably rigged the ship's transceiver to jam our sensors."

Spock raised a brow, "Where would the Talosians have obtained the knowledge to do that?"

"Dragged it out of the survivors, maybe?"

"Or tricked the survivors into _doing_ it," Danar added, "Based on what Riley's team observed, it's likely they've adopted Talos City as a kind of slave labor force."

"In either case," Spock said "They have had twenty five years to prepare for hostile contact, thus we should assume that Columbia's shields and phasers may also be operational, and potentially the ship's photon torpedo launchers. We have so far been spared further aggression only because the Talosians believe their deception has succeeded, and they expect Enterprise to be leaving orbit soon. If we appear to be investigating the crash site too closely, it's likely the Talosians will escalate to overt aggression, further complicating the rescue effort."

"I disagree, Commander," Uhura said, tapping her knuckles on the table, "I think the Talosians are expecting us to attempt a rescue, and I think they'll get suspicious if we don't live up to their expectations."

Spock frowned, "Surely they know it would be illogical to attempt a rescue under those conditions. If our ground teams cannot be sure of anything they say or anything they do..."

"The Talosians aren't expecting us to be logical. If they know anything about humans, that's probably the _last_ thing they expect. Besides, they don't know how much we've been able to work out about their mental abilities. A less experienced crew might blunder right in to whatever trap they're setting for us next."

Spock's eyes scanned the ceiling for a moment, then he looked at her sideways, "You assume they are setting another trap for our ground teams?"

"I assume that they expect us to try to rescue the Captain," Uhura said, "And that they know we won't stop until we succeed. But when they chased us off the first time, they wanted us to think that this entire situation was engineered by them in order to capture one or two of us. Why would they do that?"

"Ah," Spock saw the point she was reaching for, "You believe the Captain's abduction is a diversion."

Uhura nodded, "And I think they want to keep our attention focussed on _that_ problem so that we won't look too closely into what they've been up to."

"You're saying we should play along with the game," Sulu said, "And eventually they'll give us the Captain back."

"It _would_ be prudent to behave in a way the Talosians would find easy to predict," Spock said, "However, we _should_ arrange an alternative action in the mean time," he stood up sternly, deliberately, "Lieutenant Uhura, you will work with me to locate a remote Talosian population center unrelated to this one. We will need to learn more about local practices, psychology and biology in order to accurately predict their motives."

Uhura sighed, "You're putting me on beast patrol?"

"You're welcome to remain aboard if you would prefer..."

"Ugh... No problem, I'll get right on it."

Spock nodded, "Mister Scott, I suggest you and Keenser begin outfitting one of our shuttlecraft for remote-operated reconnaissance."

"Why not send an ordinary probe for that?" Scotty asked, "The S-102s can handle atmosphere just fine."

"I would prefer the Talosians not to be able to determine with any degree of certainty whether our shuttles are manned or not."

"Ah... because eventually, we can surprise them by using the shuttles to get the drop on them."

"Just a possibility," Spock nodded, "Meanwhile, Mister Sulu, you will coordinate with Lieutenant Hendorf in an attempt to penetrate the Talosian stronghold. This is to be a diversionary attack, which means that should you manage to gain access you will not-" Spock trailed off as he realized he no longer had their attention, and turned as he realized the briefing room doors had opened behind him. All eyes were on the door, and on the two people who had come into the room in the last five seconds. Doctor Piper was there with a worried expression, and leaning against him like a crutch was Lieutenant Janice Rand, the Enterprise's once and future Chief of Security, dressed in a surgical gown and an angry scowl.

Even Spock couldn't hide his astonishment. "Lieutenant!"

"So the Captain got abducted on an away mission," Rand rasped, "And nobody thought to wake me up?"

Until recently, she hadn't seemed like the type to joke lightly about having been filleted by a Klingon war saber less than a month ago. Even so, Rand had been one of the lucky ones; three other security officers had beamed back to the ship in pieces, and two had been vaporized altogether. "I was not aware that you were fit for duty," Spock stood up slowly, "In point of fact, I was not aware that you were _still alive_."

"Neither was I," Rand sighed tiredly, then heaved a few dry coughs as she gestured for Doctor Piper to help her to a chair at the table. Languidly, stiffly, she dropped into the empty seat, then folded her hands on the table top and asked, "The crew's safety is _my_ responsibility," she went on, "Especially the Captain's. If you wouldn't mind bringing me up to speed on what's happening-"

Spock nodded, "As you wish, Lieutenant."


	6. Chapter 6

**CAPTIVE, AUDIENCE  
** Talos-IV, Planet Surface  
Talosian Menagerie  
Stardate 2261.39

\- 1800 hours -

Captain Kirk spent the better part of an hour checking the perimeter of the cell, looking for seams, access ports, weak spots, hollow spots, anything they could possibly use as an escape vector. Not that he really expected the Talosians to make it that easy for him, but the possibility that they might have overlooked something was worth considering. Yet the padded walls seemed utterly solid, and even the loose mats on the floor gave way only to solid rock underneath. There was no sign of an entry or exit to this cell, and Kirk suspected that the crab-creatures might depend on some kind of transporter technology to move specimens in or our of it.

A slightly bigger mystery was the woman named Vina. She had appeared in their cell completely unexpectedly, just a shivering mass of femininity wrapped in a short sky-blue miniskirt. From the moment she appeared she'd seemed oddly resigned to the entire situation, sitting there cross-legged and brooding as if being confined to this cell was nothing unusual to her. Doctor Marcus occupied herself by bombarding her with questions and pleading for help, and for the past fifty minutes Vina's only responses had been variations on "I wish I could tell you."

At length, Kirk gave up the inspection of the cell and replaced Doctor Marcus on the floor next to Vina. He sat with his back to her at first, staring straight ahead as if something on the wall had caught his attention. Then seemed to give it up, and turned to Vina casually, "Well, we've established there's no obvious way out of here. What happens next?"

Vina shrugged, "Whatever they want to do with us, they'll make it happen."

"How?"

"I can't talk about it now."

Kirk frowned, "What happens to you if you do?"

Vina thought about this for a long moment, he cold expression breaking for a moment or two, "I'll be punished."

"Sounds like fun. So what _are_ you allowed to talk about?"

Vina sighed, as if she'd been dreading this question for most of the month. "You. Us."

"What about _them_?"

"Don't concern yourself with them. I only know what's expected of me. In a few minutes w-"

Something in the air suddenly turned foggy, and then the padded walls of the cell were gone. So was Vina, and Marcus likewise vanished. Kirk found himself standing in a large open area on a metallic platform somewhere, in almost total darkness except a few remarkably optimistic light fixtures and a few odd-looking workstations manned by bald, tattooed figures.

Kirk immediately recognized the scenery as the Narada's ore processing bay, a place he'd found himself over two years ago, exactly where he and Spock had beamed aboard in what was supposed to be a clandestine attempt to sabotage Captain Nero's doomsday weapon. "Shouldn't be a soul in sight," Scotty had assured him, and any other day he would probably have been right, except that then - as now - he'd materialized in a room _full_ of Romulans, who'd spent only a handful of moments puzzling at the spectacle before the first of them drew their weapons and fired at them.

He couldn't tell if it was an illusion or a hologram, or even just a well-timed hallucination. But finding a phaser in his hand - and finding no sign of Spock in the room where he had been twenty eight months ago - Kirk didn't question the evidence of his eyes. He simply picked out the nearest visible Romulan, the one with his hand closest to a weapon, and locked his phaser and fired a pulse straight at his head.

\- 1807 hours -

The monitor screen hadn't worked in ages before the Workforce arrived, and even with their deft repairs it was barely functional now. It helped to give him a point of focus for the images he was extracting from the Humans' brains, but it the images were still fuzzy, unfocussed, more essence than actuality, like a kind of moving abstract art.

The Keeper was able to tell in the vaguest sense what was happening by watching movements and emotions, the echoes of the primitive thoughts his mental probes could discern. He sensed fear and exhilaration, desperation and rage. Most of them were artifacts of the experience from which this illusion was modeled, but some of it was emerging from the here and now, obviously a reaction to having to face this scenario for the second time in his life. _"I do not fully comprehend this memory,"_ said the Keeper, watching Kirk with growing fascination, _"the feelings and thoughts are jumbled, contradictory..."_

 _"It is the excitement of a life-or-death struggle,"_ said the Watcher, observing with rapt attention as the performance unfolded, _"A recollection of combat."_

 _"But what is this sense of duty? A residue of extreme devotion...?"_

The Watcher clicked his forelegs together as he probed deeper into the specimen's mind, _"The nature of the combat has a concrete objective. Something to recover, or perhaps something dangerous to eliminate."_

 _"This may yet suffice,"_ the Keeper watched for a few moments, noting the intensity of his movements. Kirk had crouched low and found cover behind something, firing off an ethereal service phaser at phantoms only he could see, _"Perhaps we shall give him a more interesting objective."_

\- 1920 hours -

In the end, it was really just an elaborate video game. Convincing as it was, Kirk could almost taste the unreality of this scenario as he fired his phaser again and again, dropping Romulan officers one after another as they witlessly wandered into his line of fire. Even with Spock to back him up, it had never been _this_ easy; his memory must have exaggerated the details, and now he was reliving the experience with hindsight telling him that the Romulans had been surprised and confused by his sudden arrival and lacked the training or the leadership to regroup properly.

And of course there came the last one, crouching low towards Kirk's position, obviously moving towards the flashes of phaser fire but not really seeing their origin. This one was quicker than the others, yet Kirk had him dead to rights and took his time lining up a shot. On the Narada, he'd stunned this Romulan so Spock could pry the needed information from his mind; Spock wasn't here now, so Kirk set the phaser on manual fire and put a continuous beam right through the left side of his chest, instantly cremating his left shoulder and part of his torso.

Kirk wasn't sure that a phaser would actually _do_ that, but he'd heard enough stories for it to find its way into this illusion. Which meant the illusion was concocted entirely out of his memories and emotions, maybe even his sense of humor. Which also meant the objective of this little game _should_ be the same as the real deal. On the other hand, the illusion had certain differences, Spock's absence being the most obvious. On the chance that the Talosians might simply be using this as an example of a desperate rescue mission, Kirk decided instead to make a beeline straight through the core of the Romulan ship, far from its cavernous ore processing bay and closer to the machining bay where Captain Pike would be strapped to a table having his brains slowly eaten by centaurian slugs.

His mind was exaggerating other details. For starters, he hadn't remembered the Romulan ship being this huge, or this menacing. For some reason every ladder and stairway seemed to be designed for someone at least three feet taller and a hundred pounds heavier, and from time to time Kirk would brush past a pool of something that looked suspiciously like molten sulfur. And he remembered, belatedly, that the Narada had reminded him of that canyon on Io where Captain Pike had intentionally stranded the entire Sophomore class as part of their survival training. So what _else_ might have been rolled into this illusion?

Again with the benefit of hindsight, Kirk waited quietly in a corner of the machining bay until the two Romulan gunmen he hadn't noticed the first time made themselves apparent. Kirk shot the first one through the side of the neck, trained on and blasted the second through the thickest part of his leg, sending him face-vaulting into the deck plating in front of him. That much accomplished, all he had to do was release Captain Pike and signal the Enterprise for beamout...

But the person on the table was most decidedly _not_ Captain Pike. Kirk didn't initially recognize her because he was too distracted by the spectacle of an stupendously beautiful half-naked woman strapped to the table - reduced to underwear and the mangled tatters of a uniform - to pay any attention to her face, but after a few moments he managed to stammer, "Vina? What are _you_ doing here?"

"Waiting for room service... what's it _look_ like I'm doing?!"

Kirk quickly unfastened the restraints and turned her loose in the shallow pool of foul-smelling water around the table. Vina dropped into it clumsily, about as clumsily as Captain Pike had six months ago. "Why are you here? In this place? Why _now_?"

Vina stared at him blank faced for a moment, as if trying to decide how to answer - or not answer - that question. Finally she said, "We have to get out of here right away. Where's your ship?"

"My ship..." Kirk reached for his communicator to call for beamout. But his communicator wasn't there, in fact neither was the clamp that would have fixed it to his belt. In fact, neither was his belt. He was in standard uniform, no equipment on his person except the service phaser and the hand phaser he kept in his boot pocket. "I think there's a ship for us in their landing bay."

"You _think_?"

"It's a Vulcan ship. Spock was supposed to fly it, but he's not here for some reason. I doubt that it matters."

"If that's what you did in reality, then that's what we should do now."

Kirk hesitated at this, "In reality, I used my communicator to beam out of here."

Vina looked him over for a moment, then frowned, "Where's your communicator?"

"I don't know."

"Damn... we'd better get to that Vulcan ship, the-"

"I beg to differ!" bellowed a voice from somewhere behind and above him, rushing down the passageway Kirk had come through before. He managed to shove Vina back behind cover just before the approaching figure opened fire, and dove for cover himself as a burst of disruptor fire narrowly missed decapitating him where he stood. He hadn't been expecting this, but the way this scenario was playing out, it wasn't completely surprising that Nero himself would chose this exact moment to show up with a disruptor rifle in his hands and that sardonic grin eternally plastered to his face, "So this is the great James T. Kirk! Cowering in fear behind a barrel of fertilizer!"

Kirk leaned out from behind the barrel and fired off a pair of quick pulses, then dove to the superior cover of a tall computer console just as Nero's disruptor tore the barrel to pieces.

"That's right, run! Run away!" Nero began to circle around the catwalk, trying to get a better angle on the console to shoot at his Starfleet opponent, "Run to safety and don't look back! Face it, James, you've been running away from me since the day you were born!"

"Didn't I _kill_ you once already?" Kirk shouted back from behind the console, "I've got better things to do now!"

"Oh? What about your friend Vina? Has _she_ better things to do now?" Nero looked back towards the stack of spheroid containers where Vina was still crouched down low, trying and mostly failing to hide from view, "By the time I'm through with you, little lady, centaurian slugs will be the _least_ of your problems!"

Looking at the way Nero was circling, Kirk noticed an opportunity growing. The passageway towards the hangar section was close enough that Vina could probably make it if she made a dash; it wouldn't be difficult to draw Nero's attention from this angle, at least long enough for Vina to get away. And without Ayel here to sucker punch him he might even be able to dispatch Nero on his own...

Then he thought better of it. This "opportunity" was just too damn convenient. It was like one of the action cues on a children's holonovel, the obvious proper choice presented in such a way that you're supposed to feel like a genius for noticing it. It was just the latest element of patent unreality about this entire situation, and with this, Kirk had had enough: he leaned around the side of the console, and fired a single pulse at its maximum disruptor setting right into the middle of Vina's forehead.

She didn't seem to see it coming, but for an instant there was an expression of shock and disgust on her face before the phaser pulse vaporized the upper two-thirds of her skull and sent her flailing corpse tumbling backwards into the water. And yet Kirk had exactly no time to grapple with the implications of this gambit before he felt the grip of a transporter beam tearing at his body, breaking him down at the subatomic level and transmitting his energized mass through the mind-warming domains of subspace...

Only to materialize, once again, in the middle of the Narada's ore processing bay to the startled shouts of dozens of unprepared Romulans. "Reset button, huh?" he muttered to himself as he drew his phaser and began this fiendish simulation all over again.

The second time around it is was so easy that Kirk actually took the time to count the number of Romulans in the room as he shot them down one by one. He took a mental note of this for the next repeat and quickly moved on, exactly the way he did in the last run - through the inexplicably Io-like corridors and down the foreboding passages towards the machining room and his objective. Once again he found Vina lying half-naked and bound to an operating table; once again, this time without even bothering with introductions, Kirk raised his phaser and aimed it at directly at her head.

"No, no, don't do that! I'll actually _feel_ the pain every time you sh-" Kirk pressed the trigger, and Vina's upper torso disintegrated under a long concentrated phaser blast that also melted part of the table behind her.

And _again_ he suddenly materialized back in Narada's ore processing bay. Briefly he remembered the count of the number of Romulans in the room, but not before first asking himself, "Is that right? Does it really hurt that bad?" Curious, Kirk put the barrel of the phaser under his chin and pulled the trigger...

"Guess not," he said, as he, for the fourth time, found himself again materializing from a transporter beam inside of Narada's ore processing bay. And how many times would the Talosians let him intentionally flunk this test before they gave up and tried something else? Five times? Ten? Fifty? Only one way to find out...

He cleared the ore processing bay more quickly than before and used the extra few seconds to inspect one of the corpses and collect a disruptor pistol from the dead man's belt. This time, he didn't bother heading to the machining room, he took the next passage down and took a beeline to the hangar section where he knew - if this simulation was anything like reality - Spock's science vessel should have been.

It was there alright, though it looked considerably different than Kirk remembered. He hadn't had that good a look at it when he'd seen it the first time, and whatever was involved in this simulation clearly didn't have much to go on for recreating the actual image. Now, as then, Kirk made his way up the access ladder into the smooth Vulcan hull, up and through a set of airlocks to the containment section in the center of the ship with its enormous sphere of red matter.

"This all looks good," Kirk muttered, then raised his phaser and the Romulan disruptor and fired both of them directly into the red matter in a long continuous blast.

He got the distinct impression the red matter must have detonated - that was the point of this entire exercise anyway - but instead of again materializing in the ore processing bay, Kirk found himself kneeling in the Talosian menagerie exactly where he'd been moments ago. Doctor Marcus was sitting in the far corner, trancelike as if lost in some incredibly deep day dreams. Probably living out her own simulation, Kirk thought, which immediately lead him to wonder why the Talosians had let him off the hook so easily...

"You son of a bitch!" Vina snarled at him from a little corner of the menagerie. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face streaking with tears as if she'd been crying for the past hour. Behind her, beyond the transparency, stood the three Talosians from before. The two larger ones were rocking back and forth on their long segmented legs, eye stalks oscillating inwards and outwards. If a four-foot-tall hyper-intelligent crab creature could look frustrated, that's exactly what these two were doing now. And yet the smallest - the Keeper, Kirk assumed - was standing very still, staring at him with its eye stalks held back and close together against his head.

Kirk came to his feet and shrugged, as if he couldn't understand what any of the trouble was about. "Why's everyone looking so depressed? What's the deal?"

 _"Your thoughts are discordant, inconsistent,"_ one of the Talosians - the one who had first commented on his intelligence - said in his mind, _"Your actions are irrational..."_

"What's irrational about it? You sent me on a search and destroy mission, so I completed that mission."

"You shot me in the _face_!" Vina whined from behind him.

Kirk looked at her out of the corner of his eye, "So what?"

"So what?!"

 _"Interesting,"_ the Keeper stared at him for a moment, then immediately turned to leave. The three of them moved as one through a low, jagged doorway and descended on the platform of what Kirk suddenly realized was some type of elevator car.

"What do you mean 'so what'?" Vina bellowed, rushing to her feet, "You _shot_ me, you ass!"

"With what phaser?" Kirk turned all of his attention on her now, "It was an illusion, remember?"

Vina glowered at him, "So what if it's an illusion? You _feel_ it, that's what counts! Do you have any idea what it's like to take a full-power phaser blast to the face?!"

"No I don't. And neither do _you_. These illusions are based on our memories, not simulations of real events. If you don't already know that feeling, the best they can do is approximate it. Really, it's your _own_ fault for having such a morbid imagination."

Vina folded her arms and sat down angrily on the bench in the corner of the cell. "Just my luck. Twenty years trapped on this planet just to get rescued by some crazy masochist."

"I'll do worse things to you on our next run unless you give me some answers. Of course, if you help me out I just might _save_ you from the Romulans instead of killing you."

Vina snorted, "Next time they won't use the same illusion. You've annoyed them, Captain. _You'll_ be punished too."

Kirk shrugged, "The offer stands. It's not like sharing what you know can make things worse. If the Talosians don't torture you, _I_ will."

"Fine... what exactly do you want to know?"

"For starters, I want to know who you _really_ are and why you know so much about these aliens."

"I told you who I am. My name is Divina Hernandez. I know about them because they've been running my life, screwing around with my head, month after month, year after year, for longer than I can remember. Experimenting on me, testing my responses to stimuli, to pain and pleasure, to fear and excitement."

Kirk had expected as much. "They experiment by creating the illusions, testing our reactions?"

"Derived from our memories, yes. They change certain things to see if we'll react the same way under slightly different circumstances. They can make us see anything they want us to see, feel what they want us to feel."

"Can they control our actions? Make us, you know, _do stuff_ to each other?"

"They can't keep you from seeing or remembering, but they can change what you see, or how you remember it. They can affect your emotions, but they can't make you do anything against your will. Instead, they _trick_ you. They reward you when you cooperate and they can punish you when you're disobedient... like when you shoot the person you're supposed to be protecting, for example."

Kirk grinned, "Penalty box for their little game... do you have any idea what the _purpose_ of these experiments is?"

Vina shrugged, "I wish I knew. They have different specimens from different planets, but until now I'm the only human they've ever had in their collection."

"Until now?" Kirk raised a brow, "What about Talos City?"

Vina frowned, "Talos City is an illusion. It was never really there."

"You don't sound very convinced of that."

"If I'm wrong..." her frown deepened, "No, it's an illusion... not real... I..." she shook her head now as if she was trying to sift heavier thoughts from lighter ones, "It's _possible_ that they've kept me from seeing what's really on top of that hill. Or that they've kept the others from seeing me. That, I _know_ , is within their power. But it's not a possibility I'm willing to consider."

"Because of Ricca." Kirk said.

Vina nodded. The complete answer was written across her face like a subspace message. _They made me believe my daughter was a fantasy._

It wasn't the answer Kirk was looking for, but it told him volumes about the situation. In particular, it meant nothing Vina told him from now on could be completely trusted, because Vina was in no position to know whether or not anything she told him was actually true. For that matter, he could not even be sure that _Vina_ was real, and even if she was, whether or not she was truly even human.

"Tell me about this menagerie of theirs. Is this some special project of theirs," Kirk asked, "or is this just what they do?"

Vina sighed, "I don't know much about their culture, just that they mostly live underground, out in isolated pockets of civilization, alot like the Americans after the Eugenics Wars."

Kirk remembered that Ricca had mentioned that to him once before. That struck him as a powerful coincidence. "Was there a war on this planet or some other catastrophe?"

"Some kind of devastating conflict, centuries ago. I don't know the details. But the strange thing is, neither do the Talosians."

"What do you mean?"

Vina chose her next words carefully. It almost wasn't worth the risk of punishment to divulge this to a man who had already caused her so much pain. Then again, she was practically acclimated to it by now... "Every now and then, they bring me down here to help work on their machinery and computers. A few years ago, I figured out how to link their historical database to the shuttle's computer. When they're not watching or controlling me, sometimes I can sneak a peak at their records and see what I can find out. The thing is, the records are..." she shook her head, amazed at what she had seen there, "They're a _mess_. Half of them contradict each other, the other half are just plain impossible. It's as if someone was writing a story, but keeps changing the events around as they go. The only thing that's consistent is that they were eventually forced underground by the wars, and that they lost something they needed for survival."

"And whatever they lost," Kirk said, "This breeding experiment is intended to retrieve it."

Vina nodded.

"What did they loose?"

"I wish I knew. Maybe something biological, or s-" something in the corner of her eye caught her attention, and suddenly she was transfixed by something else in the cell that, as far as Kirk could tell, wasn't really there. Whatever it was it filled her with such terror that she turned deathly pale and immediately held up her arms to shield herself. They evidently did no good at all, for in the next moment Vina let loose a scream of unfathomable terror, then tumbled to the floor of the cell writhing in pain. Kirk couldn't begin to guess what kind of illusion the Talosians had unleashed on her; she said nothing of what she was experiencing except to thrash around on the floor, howling in agony as if she was being boiled alive.

And then she was gone. Kirk didn't see her move anywhere or leave the cell, he simply became aware that she was no longer in the cell with him, and hadn't been for a considerable amount of time. He'd been allowed to witness her agony from an outsider's point of view, but somehow during those spasms of pain she had either left the enclosure or had been removed from it by a means Kirk hadn't been allowed to see.

 _"Wrong thinking is punishable,"_ came the thoughts of the Keeper, who - Kirk now became aware - was again staring at him through the transparency, _"Right thinking is just as quickly rewarded."_

The Captain snorted at the remark, "And what wrong thinking was she guilty of that you torture her like that?"

 _"The misdeed was on_ your _part, Captain Kirk. Your conduct in this last test has been, in our estimation, an act of pure belligerence. The female will now pay the price for your lack of cooperation."_

"Oh, you're gonna spin this around and make it _my_ fault you're abusing your prisoners?" Kirk grinned, "Who's the one with limited intelligence, again?"

The Keeper took a quick, deep breath and then blew it out again in a low whistle. This time, when he spoke again, his words came not as thoughts, but as sounds, spoken as plainly as Kirk's own words, but in a mechanical-sounding croaking voice, like the sound of an audio distortion forming into words. "If you continue to resist, a similar experience can be provided for yourself and for your remaining companion."

Kirk glanced at Marcus, expecting to find the her still sitting in her trancelike state playing out her own illusion. To his surprise, Doctor Marcus was simply sitting against the wall, fully awake, staring at him and the Keeper with an anxious expression. He couldn't be sure how long she'd been out of it, but he half suspected she'd been tuned in just long enough to watch Vina scream and vanish. "What do you say we cut the games for a while," Kirk folded his arms and leaned sideways against the transparency. He kept his gaze neutral, not looking at the Keeper or his his cellmate, not at the hole in the world where Vina's body had been, or anything else for that matter. He fixed all his focus on the grey featureless wall in front of him and the point of the conversation itself. If he was right, if the Talosians could only clearly read his emotions... "What do you _really_ want from us? What's the point of all these tests?"

"It is simply our intention to collect and perpetuate a healthy population of your species for our purposes. Our intentions are not dissimilar from your own: scientific curiosity and the thirst for knowledge."

An obvious lie, Kirk knew. There was too much going on here for curiosity to be the motivating factor. If they were really interested in science they would have conducted these little mind games on an unwitting specimen, never revealing the true nature of his captivity. Considering how expertly their pyramid had been camouflaged, it stood to reason they had tried to do this for the Columbia survivors once, but they'd given that up decades ago.

Kirk let it go for now, forced himself not to dwell on it incase the Talosian could sense his incredulity. "So we're lab rats in your little maze, is that it?"

"I should prefer an analogy to your planet's conservatories and zoos..."

"Right. Not _just_ experiments," he glanced at Marcus for a moment, "We're breeding stock."

"Correct."

"Oh, lord..." Marcus winced.

"Your species' mating habits are known to be generally monogamous," the Keeper added, his tone slowly becoming sardonic in a subtle, alien way, "Therefore, we will allow you the freedom to select from _either_ of the female specimens you presently have at your disposal. You will be given a period of thirty Earth days to consider your choice-"

"I don't need a month," Kirk looked back at the Keeper, "I choose Carol."

Doctor Marcus jumped to her feet in a look of pure amazement, then she thought about it and sat down in bewilderment. Evidently she didn't know whether to be flattered or offended and decided not to draw attention to herself until she sorted out which feeling was more appropriate.

"On the condition," Kirk added, "That you let Vina leave this planet in peace."

The Keeper rocked slightly backwards, resting on the base of his metallic shell, "If that arrangement appeals to you, the young female may be released if and when your cooperation has been properly demonstrated."

"Meaning?"

"When we have judged that you have properly accepted the reality of your new life, and have taken the necessary steps to impregnate the female of your choice."

"Oh, is _that_ all I have to do." Kirk laughed, partially at the absurdity of the Talosian suggestion but partially at what he now realized was the oversight of his captures. He remembered now, if through a haze of Talosian trickery, that Lieutenant Bakerville had already examined Vina's daughter had found she was already at least three weeks pregnant. The Talosians obviously didn't need human breedstock, and they certainly didn't need to use a middle-aged woman - fit as she still was - for that purpose.

But their opinion of human intelligence being what it was, did they really think Kirk wouldn't realize this? They _knew_ he had seen Talos City and they knew he understood the implications. Why were they acting as if he the colony was an illusion?

 _Because they don't want me looking into what they've been doing up there,_ came the obvious answer. If so, this were going the extra mile to try and sell it...

"No deal." Kirk said.

"Your reluctance is not a rational response. We are in control of the situation and you will do as we instruct you, sooner or later. It would save yourself a great deal of hardship if-."

"No deal," Kirk said again and folded his arms, "You'll have to use your bag of tricks to produce the results you want. We won't be a willing party to your games."

The Keeper took another deep breath, an expression of growing irritation, "Your willingness to cooperate is not at issue here..."

"You bet your ass it's an issue!" Kirk unfolded his arms and pressed his palms against the transparency, "You can frighten us and you can torture us and we'll still refuse. The worst you can do is kill us, and if do, there goes your breeding stock. Seems you need us a hell of a lot more than we need you, and in that case, those are my terms. I'll _stay_ with Carol - nothing more, nothing less - _if_ you let the girl go free. I'm not gonna marry her, not going to impregnate her, not gonna sell her one of my kidneys."

The Keeper seemed to be grinding his teeth, whatever it was the Talosians used for teeth, "The illusion of Vina's departure can easily be arranged."

Now _there_ was an interesting statement. Probably wasn't a prudent thing for the Keeper to admit, but as the conversation went on he was becoming visibly frustrated by Kirk's obstinacy and it was causing him to slip. "So could the illusion of her torture."

"Indeed," said the Keeper, almost spitefully. He gave no warning or no other indication of what was coming next. He simply narrowed his eyes as if in concentration, and then looked directly at Kirk.

As quickly as that, Kirk was on fire. He felt the skin on his arms and legs blistering and bursting, felt the flesh unraveling and fall away from his bones in smoldering fibers, felt layers of heat upon heat penetrate him to the very core. Pain mixed with horror at seeing his flesh smoldering and falling away from him, of feeling a crack in his jaw and watching all of his teeth spill from his mouth along with a writhing blob of what used to be his tongue, and finally even watching his nose and lips slide down his face, crackling like slices of overcooked meat in the flames that consumed what was left of him.

Then he was whole again, lying on his side on the floor of his cell. Doctor Marcus was kneeling next to him, trying to provide some comfort and not even knowing where to begin.

"From a motion picture you once saw in childhood."

Catching his breath, Kirk pushed up to his hands and knees, shaking off the shock of being immolated alive and the memory of the pain still fresh in his mind. "If you spend enough time around humans," he said with a groan, "you'll find out pretty quickly that we'd rather die than be exploited for some other being's sick pleasure."

The Keeper took a few small steps back. Then his eye stalks rose perceptibly in what could only have been the Talosian equivalent of a grin, "If death means so little to you, from deeper in your mind there are things even more unpleasant. You may consider said exploitation for one of the females to be a preferable alternative to the types of horrors that the _three_ of you will suffer if you should refuse."

Kirk laughed, "Don't waste your breath. Starfleet officers are trained to suffer _any_ torture without cooperating with a hostile force. In the end, you'll just have to kill us."

The Keeper's eye stalks rose even higher and now Kirk _knew_ he was smiling. He turned back towards the elevator platform across from the transparency. "We shall see," he said, and disappeared into the lower levels.


	7. Chapter 7

**ESCALATION**

Columbia Crash Site, Talos-IV  
Stardate 2261.40

\- 1218 hours -

Jim Kirk never remembered the wake alarm in his quarters being so gentle, or so effective. It was a most charming and serene way to wake up, and part of him knew it was only because he had managed to the kind of full night's sleep one only expects from a night of good food, light drinking and marathon lovemaking. The kind of sleep you get when every possible biological urge has been completely satiated and there's nothing left to do but split into a temporary bliss-induced coma.

He thought about sitting up and stretching, but Carol's cheek was glued to his shoulder and her naked, slender frame was wrapped so tightly around his leg he'd need a photon torpedo just to separate himself. Not that he particularly wanted to at the moment; his recent memories were of vigorous sexual passion and some pillow talk about future plans, none of which were likely to be real.

Carol murmured something against his shoulder, frowned, then rolled over to her opposite side. Then he saw her head lift from the pillow and she turned back to face him, a puzzled look on her face. Then the smile. The shy, embarrassed but welcome smile of someone who had learned something surprising and wasn't sure how she felt about it yet. "Good morning," she said softly, in a voice that seemed to ask _Is it morning?_

Jim smiled back. His memories shifted to a sense of relief and it took him a moment to understand why. _No more Talosians. No more tricks. No more illusions. No more lies. Just the truth, and the good parts of life._ And waking up to Carol Marcus was sweetness super-concentrated. Better than he could have hoped for. Better than he could have dreamed.

Carol seemed to read his mind. "You kept your promise, Jim. You got us out of there."

He shrugged, sitting up in the bed. His quarters were dim but not quite dark; the floodlight disk of the saucer section made a truncated landscape beyond the floor-to-ceiling window that dominated one whole wall of his quarters. Jim usually kept the shudders closed on that window and rarely opened it, except in this case of course it was open because how else would he know he was in space, on the Enterprise, in his quarters?

He swung his legs over the side, let his feet fall to the floor. He rubbed his eyes, working out a night's blissful sleep. After a moment he felt Carol's lips between his shoulder blades and for a few seconds it was no longer possible to think. _God_ he missed belong alone with her like this.

Too bad this was an illusion.

"What is it like being a living legend?" She whispered behind him.

Jim glanced at her over his shoulder. "A legend?"

"You're the youngest officer in history to get your own command, and you've already accomplished so much so in a short time. Most people think you're just a mad bastard with a lucky streak. But I've seen you in action now, I know better."

Jim laughed, stood up, finally managed to stretch. "Well, I have my days."

"You're better on your worst days than most people are at their best," Carol said, kneeling on the bed behind him, letting the sheets fall from her shoulders, "You're bloody _brilliant_. You make everything look easy."

 _My quarters have a water supply,_ Kirk thought, _Where is it?_ Then he remembered that the water supply for his quarters existed in a little cistern built into the wall, like a drinking fountain on a massive scale. He walked over to it, quietly filled the large metal pitcher that was always there as Carol went on. "I don't think anyone else could have gotten us off Talos Four as easily as you did."

"I don't know if 'easy' is a word I would use," Kirk said, filling the pitcher. He tested the temperature with his finger. Practically ice-cold. "And I'm not as smart as you think I am."

"Oh really? How's that?"

"For one thing, I never _did_ report you for that crap you on Ayash pulled at Doppelganger."

Marcus stiffened, "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes you _do_. You were in the isolation lab with Doctor Ayash when the Romulans boarded us. The same isolation lab that triggered that First Federation berserker weapon or whatever the hell it was that beamed back with Lieutenant Onise. And that was after I'd confined you to quarters for compromising the Enterprise' security systems just to pad your research data."

Carol sighed, "Do we have to do this _now_?"

"I didn't understand why you were doing all of it," Jim said as he walked back over to the bed with the pitcher in hand, "I thought you were reckless or just self-absorbed. But then you told me about the Defiant."

"The Defiant?" Carol sat up straighter, "You mean the story about the Parvans?"

Jim nodded. "When we first met, you knew all about Admiral Marcus' weapons programs, all about the Vengeance and the torpedoes he built. He gave you access to every project he oversaw, isn't that what you told me? But most of those programs were hidden behind a veil of secrecy. They weren't just classified, half of them were _illegal_. That's not just fatherly affection, Carol. The only way you could have had that kind of access is if you were part of the Admiral's inner circle in Section Thirty One. So you weren't just his daughter, you were his _protege_."

"I _was_ ," Carol said, suddenly stiff, "Until he betrayed me, and all of us, and everything the Federation is supposed to stand for. I came aboard the Enterprise hoping to stop whatever he was putting in motion. But I wasn't fast enough, and I didn't-"

"You always try to do things on your _own_ ," Jim said, "Hiding in the corner, sneaking through the ducts. You don't share what you know because you think you'll see a chance to use your knowledge to turn the tables and save everyone. Kinda like you're doing now."

No surprise registered on Carol's face, no indignation at the accusation or the shock of realizing she'd been made. She simply nodded slowly, acknowledging the situation. So Jim knew... what difference did it make? It was too late to change the past, too late to share what she knew about the Talosians that might... "Wait..." she looked up again and now did register surprise, " _Right now_? Don't you mean back on Talos Four?"

"I'm afraid not..." As casually as a man taking a sip of water, Jim lifted the pitcher of ice-cold water then dumped it over Carol's head.

She screamed, jumped, twisted to the ground already shivering in a room whose walls were suddenly covered in a layer of ice four inches thick, as if the Enterprise and all of its internal spaces had been carved out of a giant glacier.

"We're still _on_ Talos Four," Kirk said, looking down at her, "I haven't rescued us yet."

The icy room disappeared. Doctor Carol Marcus remembered that she was, in fact, _not_ naked and not lying on Jim Kirk's bed but was actually lying on the floor in a tattered and badly-smelling Starfleet uniform that was now cold and soaking wet. Kirk wasn't naked either, but his tunic had been torn at the left shoulder four illusions ago and the damaged persisted whenever reality returned. "I'm sorry Carol," he said gently. Although deep down, he hoped their celebration was merely premature and not a complete lie.

Doctor Marcus smiled at him weakly and pulled herself up to a sitting position. Kirk followed her eyes, saw then center on the transparency. The Keeper was there again, a sour expression on his face. " _That_ one wasn't half bad," Kirk said, "Really had me going for, like, five seconds."

"You continue to resist," The Keeper said, the electronic translation of his voice echoing through the room, "You will continue to receive correction. The female first..."

Marcus screamed, clutching her leg in sudden agony. Tears were already forming on her cheeks as she stared down in horror at what must have been a shattered femur. Kirk knew this memory almost as well as she did, so he was not at all surprised to see her look into a corner of the room at a pair of invisible phantoms only she could see; one of those phantoms would be her father, the other would be the madman who was now murdering him with his bare hands right before her eyes.

"And now You," the Keeper said, and the icy room suddenly returned. Only colder. _Much_ colder. Perhaps a dozen degrees below freezing in the northern polar region of a planet that was already barely fit for human habitation.

He heard a sound in the distance. A low, whistling, primal how, like the sound of the wind blowing through a canyon. He looked through the near-whiteout of the alien blizzard and saw an indistinct shape moving there, just a white blob against a white background. A dark spot became visible as it came closer, and then the dark spot gained a shape. A gaping, savage-looking maw filled with row upon row of razor sharp teeth.

 _Shit. Delta Vega,_ Kirk thought bitterly, _Pretty much the worst planet in the universe..._

The thought was interrupted as the ground opened up beneath him and a moving calamity of tentacles and teeth swept out of the ground, surrounding him on all sides. The alien jaws slammed shut around him like a bear trap, piercing, crushing and butchering him from head to toe.

.

\- 1450 hours -

From a hundred kilometers up, the Columbia site and Talos City almost blended together into a single feature, a long narrow smear of vegetation in an otherwise desolate world. This part of the plateau was thriving - or what passed for thriving on a planet like this - with new growth fanning out in all directions, reaching deeper and deeper into the wilderness. As the shuttle descended and circled, he could see that the pattern of growth was less natural than he might have thought; the tall supergrass forests and the water-seeking plant-life had grown in an almost elliptical pattern with Talos City almost in the center of it. This could have been a coincidence, but Spock doubted it.

Ensign Tyler was in the pilot station next to him, quietly minding his controls as the shuttlecraft sliced into ever thicker layers of atmosphere.

The view from the shuttlecraft left little room for interpretation as far as "facts on the ground." What Ensign Riley's memory told him even now was the remnant of a massacred human settlement, the shuttle's optics were showing a small impeccably planned frontier town organized around the central pyramid-shaped "school", exactly as their tricorders had shown. The few people moving around on the surface seemed oblivious to their high-flying visitors, and why should it be otherwise? The shuttle was too high and too far away for them to notice it without looking for it.

The Talosians were not so ignorant, Spock knew. The operations console was already flashing a threat assessment from the shuttle's built-in sensors; a search radar had gone active on Columbia several minutes ago, and not long after that somebody had painted the shuttle with a molecular scanning beam. This didn't come to Spock as a complete surprise, but it gave him pause as to the Talosians' intentions. "Mister Scott," he said into the microphone on his command chair, "Are you certain there is no further movement from the wreck site?"

Lieutenant Scott answered from his position aboard the Enterprise, forty thousand kilometers away and halfway around to the other side of the world; his eyes, however, showed him a view from one of the two remote-piloted shuttlecraft that were flying in formation with Spock right now, their sensor pods locked solidly on the Columbia wreck and the Talos City hilltop site. "Nothing, Commander," Scotty's voice answered from the speaker, "Just the search radar and the scanning beam, consistent with the old Mark Five arrays. No heat spikes, no weapons deployed."

"Very well, Mister Scott. We will proceed with the operation as planned." And turning to Ensign Tyler in the pilot seat he added, "Take us to position four and hold station."

"Yes Sir," Tyler worked the controls, bringing the shuttle around in a spiraling descent that circled wide around the edge of Talos City. Spock again used their time in the air to assess the situation on the ground and take stock of landmarks. As before, he saw that the region several kilometers both east and west of the crash site and Talos City were lush with vegetation where the rest of the world seemed to be in its advanced death throws. He also noticed, here and there, some small collections of structures that he took to be dwellings of the Talosians themselves. Most of them were simple canvas tents or huts of some kind, arranged in mass knot of buildings around a larger tunnel entrance dug into the rock. There were signs of more complicated structures masked by foliage, similar to the type Ensign Baskerville had observed but hadn't been allowed to remember. From the air, Spock saw that these latter structures seemed in much better repair that the more makeshift-looking tents and huts, as if they were more recent construction.

He made a note of this for later, in case it proved significant. Then he saw Ensign Tyler beginning to level the shuttle's wings and assume a hovering attitude as they slowly began their approach to their final position, just fifty meters above the surface, barely clearing the tops of the giant Talosian grassland.

"Enterprise to Spock," Lieutenant Sulu was calling in from the bridge, "We've been discussing options here, Sir. I still believe we should beam a landing party down to the surface to rush the entrance the moment you blast it open."

And Spock considered this once again. There was a cost-benefit curve somewhere he hadn't been able to pin down yet for lack of information; too many unknowns, too many risks. Nothing he had seen on the surface so far had been helpful in making that determination yet, but once they got closer perhaps...

"I'm concerned about Columbia's transporters," Said Lieutenant Rand, joining the channel from her security station on the bridge, "We lower our shields to send down a landing party, they might try to beam someone onto the Enterprise. Against a group of manipulative telepaths, we'd have a difficult time getting rid of them."

Spock had considered this possibility as well, but he'd considered the risk of this to be relatively small. Lieutenant Rand clearly disagreed, but as chief of security she probably weighted the chance of a boarding action higher on a probability curve than he did. This, as humans would say, provided a fresh perspective that helped him make up his mind. "Mister McKenna, report your position."

"Fifteen hundred meters south of your position, Sir. Approaching now." Lieutenant McKenna's shuttle was a larger heavy transport that carried the four-man infiltration team. A larger team would have been more effective, and a fully equipped team would have been fitted out with full encounter suits, reconnaissance drones, personal forcefields and field engineering kits. But McKenna and his team weren't meant to actually penetrate the Talosian compound, just make a show of trying.

Spock flipped a toggle switch on his console and an equipment bay hinged open near the nose of the shuttle. The equipment bay could carry anything from a deep field radio telescope to a short range photon torpedo; in this case it carried a Model 37 light phaser cannon, a weapon that had been optimized to punch through the shields and armor of small starships at close range. The weapon was powerful enough that it could probably excavate the entire pyramidal structure from under the vegetation and earthworks that now covered it. But that, too, would defeat the purpose of today's operation.

"Spock to all units. I have designated target now. Be prepared for Talosian interference after phaser discharge." He brought up the phaser's targeting scope and fixed it on the location where the entrance should have been. There was the slight break in the treeline where the path veered off to the right; there was the shuttlecraft where Kirk had been when he was shot. Several meters down from the top of the hill... _that limestone slab warmer than the rest of the hill._ Spock set the phaser to lock on that target and then announced, "Firing in five... four... three... two... one..."

There was a hollow-sounding electronic chirp and then a column of bright-orange fire leapt out from the nose of the shuttle, stabbing into the rock face like a flaming sword. He held the beam on target for just over a second; the limestone facade erupted like a volcano, and the steel doors behind it came apart like a the walls of a sand castle. Spock could plainly see the gaping hole where the hidden door had been, smoke billowing out of it from within.

And _still_ he could see it. The Talosians weren't masking it from his perception. He felt his heartbeat slowing from the steady hum to the pounding drumbeats of panic. "Mister Tyler, does the entrance appear to have been penetrated?"

"Penetrated?" Tyler snorted, "You blew it wide open, Commander."

"I don't understand... why would the Talosians-"

"Enterprise to Spock!" Sulu shouted, "You have incoming craft bearing one four seven, altitude three hundred and descending on your position! Take evasive action!"

A soft green glow appeared on the cockpit window above Spock's head, like a spotlight beam with a tight focus. Spock looked up in that direction as the spotlight suddenly flickered into a tiny explosion and a spreading aurora against the shuttle's forcefields. High above them, at the source of the spotlight beams, an old Temerand F1 shuttlecraft was diving on them behind a stream of bright blue phaser phaser pulses, the logo of the New Horizons Corporation painted across its nose. Guide beams danced over the hull, leading phaser pulses to their target in a withering salvo; Spock's console chirped a high-pitched overload tone, the audible warning that their forcefields were about to fail. Half a second after that, the ear-splitting metallic bang as if someone had just struck the shuttle with a ball-peen hammer.

The overload tone turned into a low-pitched warble. _Shields down._

"Going evasive!" Tyler shouted, and put the impulse engines up to maximum as he threw the shuttle into a steep climb. He knew as well as Spock did the F1 couldn't out-climb an F7, but they weren't out of the woods yet.

Spock switched his sensors to search mode and lit up the sky. They found the second shuttle almost exactly where he expected it to be: already climbing, well above the cloud layer, positioning itself to attack his shuttle when it tried to run back to the Enterprise. The colonists may have lacked for aerial combat training, but somebody down there had at least read a book on the subject.

Opening a general frequency he announced, "Spock to all units. Primary objective failed. Return to ship immediately. I repeat: primary objective failed, RTB." And in his mind he started a fifteen second countdown to receive a reply from the Enterprise and the other two shuttles, one unmanned and one crewed. Lieutenant McKenna answered immediately and started the return leg, while Lieutenant Scott answered from his perch on the Enterprise and started bringing the drone shuttle into a holding pattern.

"Enterprise to Spock, acknowledged. We are moving to the rendezvous point now."

Satisfied, Spock toggled on the shuttle's ECM pod, pumping out tens of gigawatts of electromagnetic noise and subspace interference that would scramble every sensor device for a hundred kilometers. The shuttle that had been waiting for them above the cloud layer suddenly vanished from his sensors, but Spock knew that at the same time he had vanished from theirs. Knowing where to look, he caught a glimpse of the other F1 in the distance as he ascended through the thick grey cloud layer and then watched it fall away beneath them, still flying level searching in vain for a target. In another few moments they were above Talos' stratosphere and beyond the altitude where turbulence could affect them, and moments later they were in effective vacuum, well into orbital space. Ensign Tyler leveled the nose and started accelerating laterally now, bringing the shuttle into a free-flying orbit that would eventually bring them back to the Enterprise, and somewhere behind them he knew Lieutenant McKenna was doing the same.

And his mind was already raging behind his eyes, agonizing over details and plans and probabilities. Something had gone wrong, something he'd overlooked. The simple diversion had drawn a massive Talosian escalation that even involved the colonists. Everything he thought he knew about the situation told him that the Talosians should have tried to distract or divert their attention rather than directly engage them; they were a species of deceivers, not warriors.

Something else was nagging at him too, and it took him a few moments to realize what it was. Toggling off the jamming, Spock tied the shuttle into the Enterprise's library computer and searched the database for a record of the Columbia's original manifest. The records listed four Temerand F1 shuttlecraft and six small maintenance pods that would have been functional only in space. The F1s they carried had been aftermarket Starfleet surplus, refurbished for civilian use. Columbia hadn't been carrying shuttle-mounted weapons in its hangars either.

"What were those shuttles firing at us?"

"Sir?" Ensign Tyler gave him a sidelong glance.

"What was your assessment of the colonists' weapons, Ensign?"

"They took down our shields on the _first pass_ ," Tyler said, amazement in his voice as he was just now realizing this himself, "No way they could do that with phaser rifles. Not _that_ fast."

Spock thought about the blue glow he'd noticed on the cockpit just before the first pulse hit them. A guide beam, visible in the Talosian air, which meant it was probably in the near ultraviolet frequency and with enough intensity to make the dust particles in its path fluoresce. He knew of a handful of weapons that used that kind of guidance system, one of which he had more recent experience with.

It was the kind of weapon a certain genetically-engineered madman had once strapped to the side of a Starfleet jumpship to gun down a room full of admirals.

Gateway's Model 34 autophaser was unique in that it didn't require an integrated guidance system to be used properly. The visible guide beam made finding a target easy enough that the weapon could be mounted on the back of a wheelbarrow and still be used effectively. It made sense for a stranded rag-tag colony on the edge of explored space to invest in that kind of system for self-defense. But the Model 34 had only been available for the past ten years, and then under strict export control laws that required a full accounting of all sales. Starfleet knew of every ship and every colony in the galaxy that used them for defense, but Talos Four wasn't one of them.

"Curious," Spock said, turning these facts over in his head. So the Talosians had revealed this as well: not only the fact that the colony was real and not an illusion, but the fact that it was heavily armed and carrying modern equipment. They had been forced into this option against their better judgement simply for lack of a better one at hand. "So why would the Talosians employ a desperation tactic?"

.

\- 1450 hours -

It was dark when she woke up again. Dark, but not black, and not silent either. A faint red glow filtered through a tiny confined space from no particular direction and the sound of roaring winds trickled through her ears, seemingly muffled. The sound of her own breathing was louder still, the way a person's breathing sounds louder instead of a rebreather helmet. Which, she realized, is exactly what she was wearing.

Her vision still refused to clear and the dark reddishness remained uniform even as she sat up and felt around. But nothing about the darkness changed even when she turned her head; she reached up, wiped her gloves against the visor of her helmet, and the darkness gave way to light.

Well, _some_ light. Hesperia Planum had some of the worst dust storms on the planet, and this particular storm was the worst she had ever seen. Fourteen people died in this particular storm... _were_ dying... were _going_ to die... she wasn't sure how she knew this, she just did.

And she would be fifteen if she didn't get to a shelter soon.

She sat up to her knees and had the suit's computer put a status report on her heads-up display. Oxygen reserves still at sixty percent, enough to last another twenty four hours as long as nothing else dangerous happened. Her locator and transmitter were both fried, though, and it took her a moment to remember why. _Lightning_. She'd been marching through the beginnings of the storm trying to get to her crawler when the first bolt had hit the ground five meters in front of her. She had paused, collected her wits, and taken exactly one step forward when the second lightning bolt struck her in the chest and sent her flying through the air like a human golf ball. If her shields hadn't been up, the lightning would have stopped her heart and probably ruptured the pressure garment in a dozen places. But after lord-knows how long of laying in the Martian dust, Carol's shields were no longer working.

 _I have to get out of here._

She controlled her stride to keep her footing, marching at a steady pace. Visibility was near enough that she could barely see her hand at arm's length, but her suit had an inertial fix on where the shelter was the last time she had sensor contact. The inertial navigation system could have been shorted by the lightning strike, but she had no time to run a diagnostic so there was only one way to find out.

She walked on. She walked forever. She walked until her legs hurt and she couldn't feel her feet anymore. She walked until the inertial navigation system told her the shelter was only three hundred meters ahead of her; she walked until the medical expert system fired an audible warning that her blood oxygen level was alarmingly low and she was maybe three minutes away from passing out from hypoxia.

There was something there, in a momentary break in the storm. A vertical column of something narrow and black, like a light house in a fog. It was gone just as quickly as it had appeared, but Carol started moving in that direction without knowing why. Another break in the dust, and it was there again; closer, but indistinct.

A third and final break in the dust let her finally see it for the first time: a black humanoid shape wearing an old-style pressure suit and the logo of the New Horizons corporation on the shoulder patch. She couldn't see the face of the person wearing it but she somehow knew the suit must have belonged to her mother. The figure was moving towards the shelter, slowly walking away from her; Carol picked up her pace, giving chase...

The ground shook, a flashing red light burned through the dust storm...

The corridor outside the partition was a filled with boiling black smoke. There was a sense of panic out there so palpable that it could only have been an echo of the Talosians' only telepathy broadcast through whatever vector normally carried their thoughts. Doctor Marcus felt their urgency and their anxiety as surely as she could feel her own shoes, and in the exact same way, somehow knew that they were something outside of herself.

"What just happened?" she heard Kirk shouting from behind her. Shouting because something like a klaxon was going off and it was hard to hear without standing directly next to him.

Marcus shrugged. "No idea. One minute I was on Mars chasing after my mother, the next-"

"See that?" Kirk pointed at a section of the wall directly across from the partition. For a moment it was clear to see that this was the primary source of the smoke; a rectangular opening in the wall that might once have been a hatch or a doorway. The fire had nearly burned out by itself now, its source of combustible material nearly depleted, but still the heat and the smoke persisted, and the Talosians' panic, doubly so. "Looks like Spock's making a rescue attempt."

Marcus pressed her hands to the transparency and watched as the smoke burbling out of the doorway thickened and cooled. The corridor was now full of Talosians, dozens of them shuttling back and forth as fast as their little legs could move them. Which, it seemed, wasn't actually very fast; even the healthiest ones could only scoot along, transferring weight in heavy lurching motions, and it was apparent that not all of the creatures were healthy. Some were dragging hind legs that refused to move, others walked arrhythmically, as if with a limp. A few even scooted along sideways or diagonal, as if all of their legs worked but some much better than others. It was the first time either of them had been allowed to see the Talosians for what they really were, and even then Kirk realized that he wasn't seeing everything. There was still a certain unreality about what he was seeing; less than an illusion, but more than a daydream. Like the echo of their emotions in his thoughts, he got the sense that he was also seeing the echo of their perceptions of themselves.

He wasn't sure when it happened or how, but the transparency began to darken like tinted glass, and then it became opaque. The sounds of shuffling feet and klaxons could still be heard, but this too was growing more distant as time went on. Kirk understood instantly that their perceptions were being filtered out to keep them calm, and so he was not surprised at all to hear the Keeper's voice speaking in his mind. "Your crew's feeble attempt to recover you has failed. We have repelled your landing parties and neutralized your instruments of war. We will now consider the fate of your vessel in orbit, which remains belligerent despite our warnings of-"

"We should negotiate terms for my release," Kirk said, seizing on the idea. His instincts told him to make the Keeper eat his own words, warn the poor creature that this had to have been just a probing attack to assess their captors' weaknesses. Spock was too smart to blunder into an obvious trap like that. But he kept his emotions in check for now, played up the feeling of helplessness he felt sitting here in this cage while his crew did everything to save him. "We can still find a peaceful resolution to this."

"Your species is not capable of peace," the Keeper said, "You understand only pain and violence. Your ways are not peaceful."

"They're just scared," Kirk said, "They've never encountered a mental power like yours before. They're afraid for me and Doctor Marcus. If you let us go, they'll leave you alone."

The Keeper didn't answer right away. Kirk waited patiently for him to reply, wondering what was going on in the alien's mind. Would he feel strong and reassured as Kirk wanted him to, or would he feel weak and cornered and cling to his captives that much tighter in the hope of a tradeoff later? If the situation had already escalated into mutual violence, it was probably too late for the former.

"First, a formal demonstration of our superiority. My people will now use our, as you put it 'mental powers' to affect a portion of your crew. We will remove approximately one-tenth of your shipmates by acts of self-inflicted violence."

There was no doubt in Kirk's mind the Talosians were capable of doing exactly what they described. Ironically, there was also no doubt in Kirk's mind that his certainty of this fact was also a Talosian illusion. Even if they could reach the Enterprise at this distance, they hadn't been able to compel Kirk and Marcus to mate despite what he was beginning to guess was a certain mutual attraction, and he doubted there were enough officers on the ship with suicidal tendencies for them to really trigger that kind of response.

But Kirk played along for now. "If you do that, you'll just make things worse. You'll have proven yourselves a greater threat to the Federation than we thought. They'll have no choice but to eradicate you."

"Then you suggest we simply release you to your comrades and send you on your way?"

"I suggest," Kirk said slowly, "That we should sit down and talk about the situation and try to find a peaceful solution to this situation-"

"We will demonstrate our superiority to your crew," The Keeper said with an air of finality, "And then we will drive them from orbit. If they persist in interfering with our objectives, we will destroy them. We are not a violent people, Kirk, but we cannot allow yours to interfere in the natural development of our planet."

Kirk almost laughed, but made no response. A Talosian implicitly invoking the Prime Directive was a bit like a nihilist invoking the gospels.

"What's natural about a society that is built on the backs of _slaves_?" Doctor Marcus asked, a mild sneer in her voice, "That _is_ why you blacked out our window, isn't it? Because you don't want us to see who it is that actually puts out your fires and rebuilds your facilities when something damages them."

The Keeper didn't answer this, and even the impression of his presence was gone from the room.

It wasn't a confirmation, but it wasn't a denial either. And Kirk wasn't sure if his impression about who or what was on the other side of the glass was just his imagination, or his mind trying to tell him that the glass wasn't actually translucent and that if he could only accept this fact he would see Vina and five other humans standing in the doorway of the elevator shaft with fire extinguishers, trying desperately to save their captors' laboratory from choking on its own flames.


	8. Chapter 8

**BEAST PATROL**

Talos-IV, Southern Hemisphere  
Bo'Shan Mountain Pass  
Stardate 2261.41

\- 0930 hours -

Commander Spock waited for the tingling sensation to abate and felt the cold, dry air of the alien world begin to slash at his skin. Even through the field jacket and his uniform tunic, the winds of Talos-IV felt bitter and unwelcoming. He felt the primitive emotions of anxiety and intense discomfort, and then stomped those emotions out of his psyche with the overwhelming force of Vulcan logic.

He had materialized on a tall, moss-covered hilltop surrounded by a vast, mossy plane set on all sides by high, jagged mountains. The Beast Patrol had sampled the turquoise-colored moss and analyzed it as relatively harmless, but it released airborne spores that were possibly toxic to humans. The moss was everywhere, growing in clumps and tufts like cotton candy spun on a gigantic scale. It moved with the breeze, broke away and scattered like tumble weeds and disintegrated as the winds dragged it across the plane. This, Spock figured, was probably how the stuff spread; it grew to a certain density, then let the wind break it down into spores.

He slipped his tricorder off his belt, opened the casing, and slowly began to scan the horizon on the EM spectrum, listening for any sort of radio signals or subspace impulses within the instrument's detection threshhold. He took his time, being especially thorough. He turned himself in a complete circle over the course of a minute, dispassionately watching the graphical readout for any sort of anomaly. The tricorder detected a single magnetic anomaly at 234 degrees, but nothing else in any other direction.

Spock toggled the tricorder to scan for chemical traces and enabled the preset for Talosian chemical signatures. To his surprise, the tricorder was _already_ detecting traces of of Talosian pheremones - once again, with a highest concentration coming from roughly 234 degrees. Switching modes yet again, he made another slow three hundred and sixty degree scan and saw that that the tricorder was picking up a subspace carrier at the right frequency to be a psionic field - again, strongest from 234 degrees - but it was too weak to affect anyone yet. The Talosians probably needed a line of sight for that influence to take hold anyway, and all indications were the source of those readings were much too far away.

Lastly, Spock toggled the tricorders vibrational modes and took another three hundred and sixty degree scan. Turning slowly, the instrument took a reading of every detectable vibration, frequencies well beyond Human or even Vulcan hearing, and at amplitudes too faint for either. There was the background noise of the wind through the rocks, sounds of running water from 187 and 228 degrees, and unsurprisingly, the faint rythmic vibrations of what might have been an alien vascular system from 234 degrees.

All of this was consistent with the orbital survey, so at least there were no surprises. Even so, Spock had followed the regulations to the letter in first contact procedures and had dusted off the old seldom-used guidelines for contact with telepathic species. All that was left now was to assess the condition of the actual landing site; more out of curiosity than need, he took the portable sensor head from the tricorder and held it close to the turquoise moss at his feet. The analyzer broke it down first into compounds, then base proteins, then amino acids and finally elemental compositions. Spock noted a pattern in the amino acid reading to check for later; if this stuff was edible, the right-handed dextro-based proteins in its structure might give it an interesting flavor, but other than that there was no sign that the moss or its spores would be harmful.

Once he was sure the landing site was secure, he opened his communicator and announced, "Spock to Enterprise. Feet Dry."

A moment later, five swirling masses of phased matter appeared in a circle around him. In a moment, they materialized into five humanoid forms; in another moment, these became Starfleet officers in black and silver hazard suits with hand phasers, tricorders and shield generators strapped to their belts. One of the new arrivals - a slender female communications officer Spock was particularly fond of - was already moving to take her place by his side. "The area is secured, Lieutenant. We can begin as planned."

Lieutenant Uhura asked, "Do you think our shields will do anything against their psionic fields?"

"Possible, but unlikely. We should in any case consider it a precaution."

Uhura reached down to the controls on her belt buckle and toggled the forcefield on. For just an instant, the outline of her body shimmered as if engulfed in a heat mirage, and then the shield stabilized and become invisible to the eye. From this point on, anything striking the shield with more energy than about a hundred electron volts would be deflected off at near right angles to the surface of shield boundary. "If your theory is right about the Talosians using emotion as a vector," she said, "you might actually be the _least_ vulnerable member of the party."

"And I shall practice my utmost emotional control as I endeavor to _keep_ it that way," Spock said, almost pleasantly, which made Lieutenant Uhura frown.

He gave instructions to the away team and gestured for them to follow him. Lieutenant Zhara and Hendorf moved far out to a position some fifty meters to the right and walked on a parallel path while Lieutenant Sulu and Ensign Kai flanked on the left. Spock kept to the center with Lieutenant Uhura close behind him; he took the shallow path down the side of the hill, down in the mossy field in the valley that surrounded them and then headed off in the direction of the Talosian city, bearing 234 on the tricorder's geocompass. He remembered the layout of the city as they'd observed from orbit: a few small tents or huts above ground, surrounded by stretches of what appeared to be gardens or farms or something of that nature, arranged in a loose conglomeration around a very large, artificial structure that looked like a gateway leading deep underground. Ground-penetrating radar and seismic probes had identified several underground caves beneath those jagged mountains, mostly natural caverns formed from ancient magma tubes, but at least one seemed to have an artificial expansion. They'd selected this site for two important reasons: for one, because it appeared to contain an intact and active population center, and secondly, because at one hundred and twenty six kilometers from the Columbia site it was close enough to belong to the same regional subculture but far enough that the locals probably weren't involved in the Captain's abduction, even if they had some connection to the ones that did.

Today's mission was information gathering, nothing more and nothing less. Spock now understood that the Talosians' motives were more elusive than he had imagined, and this hastily-organized beast patrol had deployed with the goal of learning what kind of creatures the Talosians really were, what they (generally) wanted and what they were likely to do to get it. Spock was disinclined, as yet, to consider them to be entirely enemies, but he couldn't be sure what they _were_ unless he knew more about them. To that end, the entrance to the Talosian "city" was just two kilometers away, across the mossy fields beset by mountains, through a rocky pass that would have been easy for humans but probably a more formidable obstacle for the diminutive Talosians.

The forty minute hike across the mossy field was mostly without incident and without conversation. Lieutenant Zhara and Ensign Kai scanned the high mountains on either side of them both with their eyes and tricorders, increasingly suspicious that their progress was being watched. Lieutenant Sulu spent most of his time making short, pithy observations of the local flora in his suit communicator, translating his words into linguicode text for the botanists to review later, while Lieutenant Hendorf kept his tricorder aimed downwards, probing the path ahead of them for landmines or other nasty booby traps the Talosians might have left for them. Uhura alternated between all of these modes, watching with their eyes as much as with tricorders, checking everything ready for anything.

Spock simply repeated inwardly his mantras and slogans, shoring up his emotional control in anticipation of contact. When the time came, Spock would be a stone in the ocean.

They reached the pass and scaled it effortlessly. The rocks were jagged but small, giving plenty of natural footholds for them to climb. A few meters up and over the rise and they were looking into a narrow winding valley along a tectonic fault line that had been the origin of the mountains in the first place. The Talosian tent city was there on the right, up a shallow incline halfway up the side of the first mountain, with the porthole to the underground towering high above it like the entrance to a hidden cathedral.

The Talosians _themselves_ were nowhere to be seen. Spock's tricorder could now clearly resolve the rhythmic churning of alien vascular systems in the distance, but he couldn't get an accurate count on how many or where they were. The readings were strongest when he pointed directly at the tents, and nowhere else. He wondered at this for a moment, setting his tricorder to check the ambient temperature and radiation levels. Too hot to go outside? Too cold? Was this the Talosian winter or were they sheltering from the blistering sunlight?

Or were they waiting in ambush for the Starfleet crew they knew was coming?

Spock lead his team halfway up the incline and then gestured for them all to halt. "Circle around to both sides and stand by. Do not open fire unless attacked first."

Uhura answered him, "Let's try to make preliminary contact."

"We can give you good cover from the high ground there and there," Sulu added, pointing up the slope to either side of the village. His other hand was down by his side, a gunslinger's pose at the holster for his phaser. He wouldn't draw that weapon until he intended to use it, and Spock knew that if Sulu intended to use it, few things in the universe were fast enough to avoid his aim.

"Very well. Move out." Spock waited for the rest of his team to disburse, then climbed the rest of the way up the slope until he reached the first Talosian tent. He paused for a moment to examine the structure. It wasn't quite as he'd expected it; it looked as if it was constructed out of a frame of twigs and reeds with a sheet of foul-smelling vegetable matter stretched across the gaps. The sheeting was probably woven out of the old mosses from the nearby fields, dried out and treated somehow. But the structure was hardly new, in fact it looked decades old, sorely in need of replacement. He decided to move on from this tent and try one in slightly better repair, but in a few moments it became clear that _none_ of these tents were in any better shape. One had fallen in on itself and seemed to be abandoned, one had partially fallen in on its two occupants who were now sitting among the debris, seemingly oblivious to the state of their home.

He came across a tent that seemed more or less intact and bent down at its too-small opening to call for someone's attention. He considered knocking, but couldn't be sure that the structure would even survive that much force. Instead he called in gently, "If you'll pardon the interruption, my friends. I could use your assistance."

A pair of shining yellow eyes appeared inside the tent, then two more in short order. Three small-bodied Talosians crawled out of the building and literally flopped down at his feet like a trio of exhausted animals, practically on top of each other. Spock recoiled away in alarm for a fraction of a second before his control reasserted himself and he began to soak in the details of what he was seeing. They were clearly the same species as the Columbia group, some minor variations in color and body shape notwithstanding; they were much smaller, thinner, with darker-colored exoskeletons and a gauntness in their faces and limbs that could only have been from chronic malnutrition. The yellow discoloration in their eyes seemed unhealthy even for _their_ species, and where the Columbia Talosians had worn stainless-steel enclosures on their backs, these creatures wore coverings that looked as if they were made from woven straw, like wicker baskets wrapped around their abdomens.

Spock didn't need to be a doctor to know that these three were dying, though he couldn't begin to speculate from what. And so it was even more alarming when the largest of them struggled back to its feet, scuttled around to face him and then looked up at Spock with what seemed to be a pleasant expression as he said, "Hello, traveler! Welcome to the Bo'shan Trading Post! You want many great supplies, yes? You'll find them most at my shop here!"

"Your shop?" Spock looked at the rotting, barely-intact tent next to the starving alien and wondered if it wasn't blocking his view of something larger. "This is _your_ shop, is it?"

"Yes, my shop this is," the Talosian looked at the rotting tent and poked his eyestalks upwards and forwards, smiling with pride, "Built this very good shop my own two hands. This very good shop has been in my family for generations. _Very_ good shop!"

Spock's eyebrow rose an inch, "You built it with your own two hands _and_ it's been in your family for generations?"

The Talosian went on as if he couldn't hear him, "How long will you be staying in Bo'Shan? I'm sure there's a rest home in the undergrounds. You don't look like you're from around here... Offworlder?"

"Yes," Spock said, seizing on a flash of inspiration, "I am here on a trading mission. My name is Spock, a dealer in Kivas and Trellium."

"Ah hah! Fellow merchant! Excellent! Come to trade, haven't you? Come inside! You will be pleased, I think! _Many_ great things I have to trade!" The Talosian waved him inside and then pulled back the flap on the side of his tent, a feat that seemed to take every bit of his strength even as he moved in. The other two who had come out with him still lay prone where they had fallen; one was panting helplessly, already exhausted. The other had stopped moving altogether and Spock deeply suspected that it had died just from the effort of getting to the door. Uhura was already tending to them, portable scanner in hand to assess the extent of their injuries. Spock could already see by the look on her face that she was not going to have good news for him.

He followed the Talosian trader into his small stinking tent and squinted in the dim space. The tent wasn't much larger than a child's bedroom, and the only light here came from sunlight that filtered in through cracks in the ceiling. Feces and assorted garbage covered most of the floor along with thirty other kinds of filth Spock could not immediately identify. Two rotting Talosian corpses were crumpled up against one wall, both clutching a large rectangular plastic case in a pose that suggested they had been fighting over it when they died. If the shopkeeper noticed any of this, he showed no sign of it, least of all when Spock saw him plop his belly down on top of a barely-intact stool and gesture at an empty wall that once upon a time might have contained shelving of some kind. "I've traded with aliens from all over the galaxy," he began, sounding impressed with himself, "We've had Bolians, Talarians, Eminians, Bajorans. You name it. Some of these artifacts date back to antiquity, when this was still a colony of the Anu'Anshee."

Spock was transfixed by the empty wall and the storekeepers seeming pride.

Then he was transfixed by the Storekeeper's _collection_. The Talosian had a wealth of artifacts the envy of any museum in the Federation. There was a Bolian mating token, a Talarian battle saber. An Eminian backup drive with its magnetic disks still intact. A case of Bajoran earrings, and the ceremonial jumpsuits of their spacing guild. It was impossible that this trader could have collected all of these himself, some of these artifacts must have been hundreds of years old. Talos-IV must have been visited over the years by many dozens of...

Spock's emotional control reasserted himself, and the storekeeper's collection disappeared. Or rather, he came to realize it had never actually been there at all, that he had simply imagined it, and in that moment he could scarcely remember why he ever thought it was real at all.

"See anything you like?" The storekeeper said, grinning with pride.

"Fascinating!" Just for a moment, Spock looked at the storekeeper and let his emotional control slip. He asked himself the question his mother had sometimes asked him in his moments of childhood weakness: _How do you feel?_

The storekeeper was actually in surprisingly good condition. Broad and muscular for a Talosian, with a swollen, supple cranium and throbbing vessels of a true thinker. He was clearly prospering from his trade, with his expensive gold-plated shell that had been custom made for him by one of the best designers on the continent. His eyes were the clear, sparkling blue hues that made the women broadcast lustful fantasies. He was, if anything else...

... the most pitiful creature Spock had ever seen. "I can't help but notice the condition of your establishment," Spock said, banishing the illusions as thoroughly as his emotions, "You must be very proud."

The Talosian looked around, seeing but _not_ seeing the interminable decay around him. "Things have never been better!" he said with a lilt in his voice, "I mean, yes, we could use a lot more visitors around here. Trade isn't what it used to be..."

"When is the last time you were visited by offworlders?"

"Hard to say," The Talosian scratched his chin with one of his legs, and Spock saw that someone or something had recently chewed off the tips of this Talosians' fingers (or toes or whatever they were) and he left smears of blood on his face in doing so, "Maybe three or four months. It's really a shame, we used to get them every other week. There's a project in the works to start broadcasting on subspace again like we did in the old days, that should attract more trade."

"You are in possession of a subspace transmitter?"

"Yes, it's in the data archive in the underground. You are not from our world, so I assume you don't know, among our people, anything we don't put up for sale is kept in the underground cities. Trading posts are just for travelers. Everything above the dirt is considered fair trade. That's _our_ custom, anyway. You should keep that in mind as you travel around. Anything someone doesn't want to trade for will be under the ground."

"Interesting... What is _your_ name, Sir?" Spock asked.

"I am the Trader," he said plainly, as if this made perfect sense.

"Trader. Please forgive me for what I am about to do." Spock reached up carefully and pressed his index finger to the Trader's head, just below the base of his eye stalk. Slowly, not to startle him, he let his fingers find the crucial junctions for the Talosian's cranial nerves, the "back door" points for a Vulcan mind meld. In physical contact, his own mental powers could easily overwhelm the Talosian influence, especially one in such a weakened state as this. "My mind to your mind... my thoughts to your thoughts... One and together... we... are..."

"One," said the Trader, his voice trancelike.

"Look around you," Spock said, feeling their thoughts begin to merge completely, "Look at your shop. Look at your world. See the world as I see it. Without pride, without despair, without denial, without acceptance. See what _is_."

The Trader looked at Spock in confusion for a moment. Then his eyes began to scan the room, and he pulled away from the mind meld. He looked around first in astonishment, then in horror, and then finally collapsed to his belly and stared into the filth between his gnawed, mangled fingers fingers in a state of profound despair.

"You are in poor health, Trader," Spock said gently, "You are living in squalor. You have no food and no water. You are _dying_."

"There's nothing I can do..." the Trader whispered, and immediately began sobbing uncontrollably, "There's nothing _any_ of us can do." If Spock was anything other than a Vulcan with years of disciplined emotional control, the sight of a giant hermit crab sobbing on the floor would have seemed almost as comical as it did tragic.

"We may be able to help you."

"Help us?" The Trader looked up slightly, "It's over for us, traveler. Like the calamities in the stories they tell. It's the end of civilization. It's the end of _everything_."

"Help me to understand what has happened to you. To _all_ of your people. Clearly you once had technology, a civilization. You traded with species throughout the galaxy. What _happened_?"

"Nothing happened," The trader looked up, and in a flash he was back to his feet, smiling and affable as ever, "Well, nothing specific. The Bajorans had a revolution and stopped trading for a while. The Bolians were conquered by the Lissepians. I guess it all started when the Anu'Anshee vanished. They used to be our biggest customers."

Spock had lost him. He was back to his fantasy world, his self-imposed illusion. He was forcing himself to imagine things in a more tolerable state of existence, where hard times weren't so hard, where the only thing they had to worry about was boredom and a slight lull in trade.

And why _should_ he face reality? The carcasses of his wives and children were scattered around his feet and had now become his only source of sustenance. His body was being slowly eaten alive by parasites, and anything of value he had ever owned had either been looted or had never really existed. Just this shop alone, even if he had the strength to do it, it would take weeks of hard work to clean and restore it to something that didn't so closely resemble a medieval dungeon. Why should the Trader strain himself to solve such an intractable problem when it was so much easier to _pretend_ the problem didn't exist?

Spock was in the midst of wondering about this when his mind suddenly stumbled over an incongruity. He had noticed it almost as soon as he'd come into the tent, but the significance of it hadn't struck him immediately. The two dead Talosians, expired of their exertions fighting over a plastic container int he corner; it was the only container of its type in the entire tent, in fact it appeared to be the only thing of value the Trader still owned, which might have explained why they were fighting over it. It was in considerably better condition than anything else Spock had seen in this dying town, so much so that he began to wonder where the Trader had gotten it in the first place. "What is _that_?" Spock said, pointing to the container. Part of him worried that the sight of his dead family members over the foreign container might jar the Trader back to his fit of desperation, but a bigger part of him had learned a healthy respect for the Talosian self-deception reflex.

True to form, the Trader immediately replied, "Oh that... that is a Sunfleet medical kit." He chuckled at the notion, "Not that anyone here has ever been in need of medical attention. It's just a souvenir, really."

"How did you happen to acquire this object?" Spock asked.

"There's a band of slavers over on the other side of the Uh'Sull valley. They've got a trade agreement with someone called the United Planets Federation."

"Slavers?" Spock asked.

"Yeah. Kind of a nasty bunch, but they make good customers. At least, they _used_ to."

"It has been a long time," Spock said, echoing the sentiment. "Even the caravans have ceased, correct?"

"Yeah. Roads must be rough or something. I hope they still remember how to _get_ to Bo'shan."

"Do you think I might purchase that Starfleet container, my friend?" Spock asked, stepping closer to it and the two rotting corpses grappling over it.

Trader smiled, "That depends. What are you offering for it?"

Spock reached into his field jacket and rifled around in his pocket. "I believe this is the answer to all of your problems," he turned slightly, pulled his hand from his pocket and held it close to him, forcing the Trader to lean closer to where he could see. As soon as the Trader did, Spock's opposite hand came up to the joint of his neck and the shoulder of his front-most legs and clamped down on the pressure point in a soft part of the Trader's exoskeleton, along the path of where Spock expected to find the appropriate cranial nerve. In an instant, the sickly creature dropped to his belly, and Spock gently rolled him on his side as consciousness drained from his brain. "Thank you for your assistance," Spock said, and moved to collect the medical kit from the dead Talosians.

Lieutenant Uhura was waiting for him just outside, kneeling in the mud next to the two Talosians who'd met him at the door with the Trader. He couldn't see Lieutenant Uhura's face through the reflection on her helmet, but somehow he knew exactly the look on her face on the other side. "How are these two, Lieutenant?"

"Both of them are dead," her voice came to him through the helmet speaker, "Some kind of acute pulmonary failure, most likely from a severe bacterial infection. There's also a lot of foreign tissue lodged in their urinary and digestive tracts, probably a parasitic infection. And Bones says the Trader probably won't survive more than a couple of days if he doesn't get medical attention immediately."

Nodding, Spock said, "Have the rest of the team begin inspecting the other tents to assess the condition of the occupants. You and I will explore the underground complex and search for any artifacts or storage media that may contain useful information..."

"Spock," Uhura raised her voice, "Did you hear what I said? These two shopkeepers just _died_! That Trader in there is dying too!"

"They're _all_ dying, Lieutenant," Spock said, "The entire Talosian species is on the verge of extinction. The few survivors have descended into a fantasy of their own making and hidden the problem from themselves because they are incapable of changing their situation."

"There has to be something we can do to help them!"

"It appears we already _have_ , Lieutenant." Spock held up the medical kit, drawing her attention to it.

Uhura recognized it immediately. "Is that from Columbia?"

Spock shook his head and turned the container so that she could see the tag stenciled on the side of it in large black font. Several months of dried blood and bile and dirt partially obscured it, but the star-and-delta seal of Starfleet and the name _USS Victory_ was clearly legible on the side of it. "This container conforms to the new design from the Axanar protocols, which were only adopted within the past five years. The seals are intact and it has not been opened."

Uhura stared at the container for a long moment, trying to put the pieces together in her head. "If Starfleet's been here that recently, why is there no record of the Columbia survivors? No mention of Talos City, no mention of the inhabitants...?"

"You seem to be overlooking the more relevant fact that there is currently no vessel in Starfleet named _USS Victory_."

Her eyebrows jumped. "You think there's some kind of coverup, Commander?"

"I think there is much of what is happening on this planet is consistent with someone's private agenda, someone operating without the official sanction of Starfleet. Though exactly who and for what purpose, I cannot say."

Uhura read the subtext in his words and suddenly her expression turned sour. "Do I need to remind you what happened the last time we got involved with somebody's private agenda?"

"You need not, Lieutenant," Spock said, then flipped open his communicator for the Enterprise frequency. "Mister Scott, we will require a medical team and additional biological specialists on site shortly. Bring equipment suitable for the recovery of large specimens and field analysis..."

"Commander, we were just about to call you. We have a priority message coming in from Starfleet Command. We've been ordered to return to Federation Space immediately. The message is tagged Code Two."

Spock and Uhura traded a knowing glance. Code Two, the middle of three general threat conditions specified in the Starfleet charter. At the default condition of Code Three, they were legally empowered as an exploration agency with situational law-enforcement powers; issuing a Code Two was the equivalent of deputizing the entire fleet into a formalized military police force. Code One was the closest thing the Federation had to a state of war. It was, simply put, the suspension of both the Prime Directive and any of the usual prohibitions on the use of deadly force, allowing Starfleet to take whatever actions necessary to neutralize a threat to the Federation. Tagging a message to the Enterprise with a Code Two broadcast meant that somebody out there was about to declare war on the Federation and the Enterprise specifically was being given the job of stopping it.

It was the worst possible time for this to be happening. "Place the ship on yellow alert," Spock said gravely, and then turned away from the Trader's tent, facing the large stone gate carved into the side of the mountain, "And have those specialists sent down immediately." He closed his communicator and folded his arms, considering. It seemed the situation was continuing to deteriorate the harder they tried to resolve it.

"What do you think we'll find in there?" Uhura asked.

Spock almost frowned. "Nothing pleasant, Lieutenant."


	9. Chapter 9

**WRITER'S BLOCK**

Columbia Crash Site, Talos-IV  
Stardate 2261.41

\- 0945 hours -

His two companions were waiting for him on the bridge of the old starship just as they always were, at the time and place he expected them. He did not remember which of them had arranged these regular meetings, but it pleased him to assume he had arranged it _himself_ as a sign of his true and unyielding leadership. He also didn't remember who had repaired the viewscreen at the front of the room that they had rigged to monitor the holding cells for the new arrivals. Vina, he assumed, although it could be any one of the other members of the Workforce.

He also knew the purpose of the meeting without needing to be told. They hadn't communicated it to him, exactly, but he had sensed their emotions well enough even before he got here to know what was the source of the great anxiety that had been radiating from them all this time. "We will have to change our plans if we want to avoid catastrophe," began the Dreamer as soon as he stepped down to the decrepit command deck. "Their method of probing our defenses was methodical and precise. The damage to the Workforce facility was relatively minor, but will take much time to repair."

The Keeper nodded in agreement, "What they lack in intelligence, they more than make up for in adaptability. A second attempt to recover their Captain would most likely succeed."

"Or destroy us in the process," said the Dreamer.

"We must accelerate the program to complete our scenario immediately, before they have a chance to mount another rescue mission. Our position grows more precarious by the second."

The Watcher frowned, and spoke out loud, "It may already be too late. Even if we _do_ complete the scenario as intended, we are still unable to influence their commanders in orbit. They are very much aware of their tactical superiority."

The Keeper had suspected as much. "Then we have no choice. We must send for assistance from the Magistrate."

"Out of the question, Keeper!" Watcher said, again speaking out loud and more clearly than before, "If our allies believe that we are too weak to handle this situation ourselves, it may jeopardize our prior agreement."

"And if this Sunfleet crew accidentally destroys the Workforce while attempting to recover their crew, what then will come of our agreement?"

Watcher looked helplessly at the Dreamer, who was already thinking through the possible outcomes of this situation. "The Magistrate as much invested in the colony as we do. He may attempt to modify the agreement, but I'm confident he will not _abandon_ it."

The Keeper considered this for a moment, and looked at the Watcher, who seemed to almost agree with this line of thought. "Send the message, Dreamer," he said, "The Watcher and I will return to the humans and begin the next stage immediately."

.

\- 1002 hours -

It was a simple illusion that didn't try too hard to present itself as reality. Intimate, comfortable, but uninteresting. Kirk had learned to interpret these sessions as "fillers," the kinds of projections they used when they weren't all that interested in the outcome. He understood that this was a reflection of the aliens' persistence, but bombarding their captors with images and scenarios to constantly reinforce their conditioning. But he also understood that these low-level simulations were not being watched attentively, and that he had slightly more freedom of movement within them than he did when his actions were more closely guided.

Even so, it took him a minute to process the discontinuity of his surroundings when they suddenly changed around him. His cell seemed to rearrange itself into a circular white hallway with a slight curve to the right and the regular paneling and imbedded light fixtures that some expert system had calculated would provide the most even and comfortable illumination aboard a starship.

"Are the torpedoes still in the weapons bay?" Carol Marcus was walking briskly ahead of him, turning the corner down that very same corridor.

Kirk realized he was walking close after her without realizing why and heard himself saying, "Loaded and ready to fire. _What are_ they?"

"Don't know, that's why I forged my transfer onto your ship to to find out why... I do apologize for that, by the way. If I caused you any problems I _am_ sorry. I'm Carol Marcus."

Kirk grinned. "Yes. I know who you are."

She blinked, the grinned back, just for a second, then turned and rushed on down the corridor. "Torpedoes."

He followed her aft and downwards, past the auxiliary hangar and into the main shuttlebay where he somehow knew that Doctor Marcus had stashed most of her belongings in the crew compartment of shuttlecraft Warrant. Scanning equipment and mechanical tools too specialized to really belong to a science officer. How she'd managed to get all of this equipment aboard the Enterprise, Kirk didn't care to speculate, and in hindsight he now realized he never did get around to asking her.

"My father gave me access to every program he oversaw," Marcus was saying as she rounded the back of the shuttle, "Including something called Project Sleepwalker. I don't know anything about the program's logistics or background," she paused, climbing up the ladder into the shuttlecraft, "But I know what it entails. The use of memory manipulation and behavior conditioning to produce deep cover sleeper agents."

Kirk seemed to recall that until a few seconds ago they were talking about torpedoes. But that, he realized, was just a memory. The scene was replaying itself based on that, but nothing was forcing them to follow the replay precisely. Doctor Marcus was playing in the margins of Talosian control, and she'd picked the perfect memory in which to do it.

The memory, he realized, where she finally did what she should have done hen she first came aboard. She was telling him what he needed to know and trusting his judgement to make the best decision possible.

"Seems like that would require a very specific skill set," Kirk said, "Not many telepaths specialize in memory manipulation."

Marcus smiled, "You're much clever than your reputation suggests, Captain Kirk." She turned and trotted up into the shuttlecraft, saying over her shoulder.

Kirk followed her inside. "I have a reputation?"

"Yes you do, I'm a friend of Christine Chapel's."

He drew a blank at the reference, though only for a moment. At the time the name had meant almost nothing to him but in hindsight he had actually managed to put a face to the name. "Christine, yes. How is she?" He followed close behind her as she moved through the shuttle, gathering her equipment onto a work bench on the port side.

"She transferred to the frontier to be a nurse. She's much happier now."

"Didn't she have a... boyfriend? Fiance? Something?"

"Doctor Roger Corby," she turned from the bench and then leaned back against it, regarding Kirk with a serious expression, "The man's a useless prat, but love _is_ blind."

"Well I..."

"Is this shuttle prepped to fly?"

"Of course it is. Why?"

"Would you please turn around?"

Kirk flinched. "Why?"

Marcus glared at him, annoyed, "Just turn around."

Shrugging, Kirk turned around.

She went on talking behind him as he did. "The proposals I've seen mention that the sleeper agents would be most effective if their conditioning time could be as quick as possible to avoid what they called 'discontinuity of presence.' A person is abducted, programmed with false memories and then returned to their home town before anyone notices they're missing. A certain audible signal or a visual image will trigger a programmed behavior. Say, the sleeper transmits everything he knows about his target via subspace, or unlocks a database at the government ministry where he works."

"Or," Kirk said over his shoulder, "He walks into a top secret weapons facility and blows himself up."

"I didn't see anything in the proposal about terrorism..."

"But I wouldn't put it past Section Thirty One. Would you?"

"Honestly?" Marcus sighed, "No, I wouldn't."

"So why are you telling me all of this?" Kirk said, turning. And he was somewhat disappointed to find that he'd missed the opportunity he'd accidentally exploited a year ago when he'd turned around to find Doctor Marcus in her underwear, halfway into changing into a field jacket for the away mission. She was already dressed now, but not in a field jacket. Now she was wearing a sky blue party dress that hugged her frame too closely to be anything but deliberately provocative.

His palms started to sweat.

"It seems to me," she said in a soft, sensuous voice, "That our crustacean friends aren't being totally honest about their motives."

Kirk nodded, "That goes without saying. They're trying to lead us to something, but I'm not sure what."

"Neither am I," Marcus said, stepping closer to him, "But there's an easy way to find out."

She didn't answer him with a word. She leaned closer to him, making solid eye contact enough that he couldn't possibly mistake her intentions.

Kirk leaned back on a reflex and dodged a kiss he knew he would regret if he let it land. "Whoa. What are you doing?"

"Acting on your choice, Jim."

"I haven't made any choice."

"You made your choice on the first day, remember? You chose _me_. In all of our fantasies together, it's _me_ you celebrate your freedom with. Admit it, Jim. You _want_ me."

"Not enough to play into the Talosians' hands. C'mon, Carol, you're smarter than this."

"They don't want us for a breeding pair. They want you to keep resisting me until something breaks. Then they begin the next phase."

"You can't know that for sure."

Doctor Marcus smiled, "Yes I _can_." She lunged at him, and Kirk had run out of shuttlecraft to back up. He held up his arms to hold her back, to warn her that she was making a huge mistake, that this would only make things worse for them...

But Doctor Marcus wasn't there anymore, and neither was the shuttlecraft. She was standing a few feet to his left now, staring out into space with a dazed expression on her face as if she'd just been daydreaming.

Vina was standing on his right, looking anxious and unhappy. She regarded Marcus with the open suspicion of someone who had abruptly stopped talking when the subject of her conversation entered the room. And she looked at Kirk along similar terms: accusatory, and slightly disappointed.

Kirk was surprised the Talosians would bring her back into the cell at a time like this, but only mildly so. It actually made a certain amount of sense. The Talosians needed to stay on script and they didn't want their actors deviating too far from the intended theme.

"See? Now we _know_ ," Said Marcus. Kirk glanced at her questioning, but she didn't elaborate further and didn't get the chance before Vina let out a wail of distcontent.

"Oh, good..." she said, eyeing Kirl coldly, " _More_ punishment."

"What are _you_ doing here?" Kirk asked, "Or have you been here the whole time and they just wouldn't let me see you?"

"I don't know that it makes a difference, except for the creepiness factor that I've probably been sitting here in the room with you while you had sex with your science officer."

Kirk began, "We never actually-"

"Keeper." Marcus was pointing at the transparency. The door to the facility's central elevator had opened and the Keeper was shuffling out into the corridor towards them.

All three of them turned to face the Keeper as he stopped in front of their cage. Kirk stepped to the front of the two women, but Marcus stayed closer behind, just within whispering distance.

"Since you are resistant to the current specimen, an alternative approach is being devised. We will now consider the ideal configuration of a possible mate, the appearance of which will be applied to the female called Vina."

"So you'll make her look like anything I like, is that it?"

"That is correct."

Kirk heard Marcus whisper something behind him he couldn't make out. It sounded at first like a foreign language, but too much like English to be that. Without a universal translator he couldn't be sure, but after a few seconds his mind clicked the broken syllables into place, "They ote-ray emselves-thay into an orner-kay."

He thought about this for a moment, suppressing the emotions that came with it. It was nothing he could pin down to support that conclusion, but it made sense. The Talosians were looking for a way to move on with the next part of this charade, but they couldn't figure out a way to make it happen. The conditions were all wrong; something they needed to happen at the right time wasn't coming into place. Considering the damage caused by Spock's rescue attempt, they probably didn't have the time to try a more subtle approach either..

So the goal of escape could be reached by playing the narrative to its logical conclusion. Talosians _loved_ their narratives, even when they were nonsense. If they'd somehow written themselves into a corner they couldn't get out of, Kirk and Marcus would have to give them an out...

It hit him in the back of the skull like a poison-tipped dart. It was simple, so simple even the Talosians should be able to see it. In fact, maybe they were hoping something exactly like this would happen and this was their latest attempt to resolve the impasse. Kirk decided to take the bait.

"That's..." Kirk looked Vina over for a moment and ever-so-slightly smiled, "Interesting."

"I judge by your reaction that you approve of this proposal."

"I approve of the _gesture_. And I intend to evaluate it from a safe distance after I've escaped from this cage and left this god-forsaken planet forever."

"Jim?" Carol said behind him, loud and clear now, "What are you talking about?"

"It's unnecessary, though," Kirk said after a pause, "Vina's fine just the way she is."

The Keeper bobbed his head slightly and then departed with a shuffling of feet.

Marcus waited until he was gone and the doors closed behind him, and then she gripped Kirk's bicep with a death grip and hissed, "You _approve_ of the gesture."

"It simplifies things," he said, turning back to the little cot in the corner of the room, "We won't have to search for Vina now when we escape."

"What makes you think we can even trust her? For all we know, she's a Talosian in disguise."

Kirk almost smiled. _Well played, Carol._ So they were on the same page after all. "She's not," Kirk said, looking in her direction, "We can trust her."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because the Talosians have taken more from her than any of us can imagine. Maybe even more than _she_ can imagine. She won't betray us." He turned to Vina and smiled, "Will you, Vina?"

"Jim, I've been trapped here on this planet for twenty years. The Talosians know everything about me. Everything I'm afraid of, everything I want... they'll use me against you the first chance they get."

Kirk reached out to her, placed both hands on her shoulders and looked into he eyes. He watched her tension level jump to maximum with this and read it in her features that he heart had just started pounding from this completely unprovoked and extremely welcome gesture of affection. "I won't let them take you away from me again. I promise you that."

"Oh for god's sake, think rationally about this, Jim! That woman is an alien sympathizer! She's probably been behavior conditioned to spy on us! _Who knows_ what she really thinks?"

"We're leaving here together, Carol," Jim turned a scowl in her direction, "All of us. That's an order."

"Jim..."

"That's Captain to you, _Doctor_ Marcus. The safety of a civilian under our care is our top priority and now I'm making it _your_ top priority. If anything happens to Vina, I'll hold you personally responsible. Is that clear?"

Marcus clenched her teeth, a gesture of grudging acceptance of authority. Somewhere buried in her expression was a note of caution for him to the tune of _Don't oversell it, Jim._

"So," Kirk turned back to Vina, "First thing's first." He guided Vina across the room to his cot and sat down next to her. When he spoke again, it was in soft, calming tones, sympathetic and encouraging. "We need a way out of this cell. It's not safe in here. To do that, I'm going to need your help." _I need to focus,_ he thought inwardly. _Need to fill my head with thoughts of protecting Vina. Tenderness, romance, affection. I want to protect her. I want to save her. I won't let anything happen to her._

"I know what you're trying to do," Vina said, folding her legs and sitting on the stone floor with an air of detachment, "Trying to disrupt their influence by controlling your emotions. It won't work, you know. I've tried."

Kirk imagined scooping Vina up into his arms and carrying her out of this cell, alive and unharmed, lifting her to the safety of a Starfleet shuttlecraft. And how grateful she would be, to be free at last.

"Humans don't have the capacity to control their emotions like that," Vina went on, "The mind wanders. Nobody can sustain false emotions for that long."

Not just Vina, Kirk realized. An image of a younger, thinner version of Vina sprang to mind, with the new life growing slowly within her. Ricca and the other children. Victor Hernandez and Doctor Haskins. People the Talosians wanted him to think were figments of his imagination. People he had kept Vina from seeing, maybe for years, and watched her heart break from the separation. He imagined mother and daughter reunited on the shuttlebay floor and smiled at the image.

"Are you listening to me, Jim?" Vina snarled, "Won't you listen please?"

"I'm sorry, dear," Kirk said, keeping his expression soft, "Lost in thought. Yes. Of course I was listening..."

" _Her_ you listen to?" Marcus rolled her eyes and parked herself in a corner of the room, suddenly sullen.

Kirk let himself feel hopeful, knowing the Talosians wouldn't know what this really meant. While he was working himself into a cloud of love and affection, Carol was quietly working herself up into a boiling rage that bordered on insanity. He didn't know how long she could keep this up, or how long he could for that matter. But if he was right about her background - if she was the seasoned Starfleet counter-intelligence specialist he thought she was - he would probably break before she did.

Just for an instant, he was aware of a movement in the wall not far from Doctor Marcus. Something in his mind told him that a seam had opened up and that a small object had been placed on the floor next to it. The only thing he could see there now was a small black rock that he was sure had always been there this entire time and there was nothing unusual about it at all. And the seam wasn't really a seam, just a line in the stone wall.

It was working.

 _I have to concentrate,_ Kirk thought, refocusing his efforts, _I have to be ready to protect Vina when Carol finally snaps._


	10. Chapter 10

**THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE**

Talos-IV Stationary Orbit  
USS Enterprise NCC-1701  
Stardate 2261.41

\- 0930 hours -

Doctor Danar and Lieutenant Uhura were just coming into the transporter room when Commander Spock materialized on the pad. They had already been briefed and given their instructions and he saw no logical reason to belabor the point and further impugn their professional pride. On the other hand he had learned long ago of the human need for affirmation and camaraderie and he greeted both of them with an approving nod and a look of calculated confidence.

Danar returned the nod and stepped up to the transporter pad. Uhura seemed surprised by the gesture, but made no comment. Spock heard the semi-musical trill of the machinery powering up as he the transporter room doors closed behind him.

Two minutes later, Spock stepped off the express turbolift onto the bridge and strode directly to the communications console where Lieutenant Hannity already had a palmcomp with a printout ready for him. Lieutenant Scott left the command chair and met him there and the three of them formed a sort of huddle around the communications console.

 _To: NCC-1701, USS Enterprise - Code 2 Priority -_

 _From: Office of CINC-SOL, Vice Admiral Richard Barnett_

 _***CODE 2 PRIORITY ***_

 _Proceed at maximum warp to celestial coordinates 346x14.81x21.6. Destination is Zeta Leporis System, Earth Starbase 11. Await further orders upon your arrival. All other mission objectives suspended until further notice._

 _***CODE 2 PRIORITY ***_

Spock read the message once, then slowed down and read it again. It was brief and to the point and incontrovertible at that.

But it also flew in the face of everything Spock thought he knew about Starfleet and the current state of affairs of the Federation. To begin with, the message was coming from Admiral Barnett himself, acting Commander in Chief of Starfleet's Sol System command; strictly speaking, Enterprise's immediate superior should have been Admiral Comsol, the director of the deep space operations division at Tau Ceti's Starbase Four.

The context was wrong too. There was no active conflict in the region that would imply a Code 2 alert either; the Orion Syndicate was still trying to annex the Laurentian Moons from the Tholians and Starfleet was still scrambling to keep the war from expanding. The Klingons were still jousting with the Romulans and the Romulans were still trying to stay off the Federation's radar. The Breen had stopped raiding Federation shipping lines and had turned their attention on the Nausicans, and the Nausicans were busy pillaging what was left of the Xyrillian homeworld. Things were tense - things were always tense in some way or another - but Code 2 Priority meant that Enterprise was being given the job of preventing if not preparing for an interstellar war.

Logic dictated that a confirmation was in order. "Ensign Chekov, Spock ordered, "compute a long-range vector for subspace communications. I will require real-time contact with Starfleet command."

"Real time? From _this_ distance?" Chekov sounded surprised, then impressed with his commander for handing him such a stimulating problem to solve, "Ve vill have to have pinpoint accuracy to establish the link, Commander. And I vill need to plot a position _outside_ the planet's magnetic field."

"I anticipated as much. As we are currently faced with an emergency situation, you are authorized to employ maximum warp power in order to more quickly reach the necessary transmission location."

Chekov thought about this, and then suppressed a smile. Of course, Spock was going about this in a very calm, rational, logical sort of way, but in other ways this entire maneuver - all eighty eight minutes of it if his top-of-the-head calculations were correct - was an incredibly elaborate "angrily dialing the phone" gesture on the part of the first officer. "I am moving the ship to a higher orbit, Commander. One quarter impulse power. Ve'll reach broadcast position eighty seven minutes."

"Very good, Mister Chekov," Spock said, and then sat back and focussed his attention on the viewscreen and the data feed from the away teams' tricorders and personal monitors. Danar and McCoy were on the surface now, he saw, and judging by their positions on the tracking screen they were almost finished with their survey of the Bo'Shan trading post and the surrounding area.

Spock clicked the contact switch on the arm of his chair and signaled the away team directly. After a long pause his favorite of all human voices answered, "Uhura."

"We are moving to a higher orbit, Lieutenant, in order to establish contact with Starfleet Command. Accordingly, we will be out of transporter range for fifty seven minutes and eighteen seconds."

.

Talos-IV, Southern Hemisphere  
Bo'Shan Mountain Pass

\- 0935 hours -

"Understood, Enterprise," Uhura answered, watching from a safe distance as Lieutenant Sulu finished cutting through the vaulted door to the underground tunnel with his phaser, "We'll proceed with caution. Away team out."

"Well that's great," grumbled Doctor McCoy, "Guess we're on our own from here on in"

Lieutenant Sulu clapped him on the shoulder, "You worry too much. If we run into anything we can't handle, Spock can be back in position inside of fifteen minutes."

"A lot can happen in fifteen minutes."

Sulu shrugged but didn't answer him. He and everyone else on this crew had learned by now not to begrudge Doctor McCoy his pessimism.

The tunnel entrance at the top of the Bo'Shan trading post had been mechanical once. The hinges were loaded on pneumatic pistons that opened the door outwards like a bank vault and could hold them open against their own eight. It wasn't at all clear what had powered the pistons originally, but whatever it was the power source had long since failed. One set of pistons was leaking hydraulic fluid and could no longer hold the doors open, the other had jammed in place and one panel of the door was stuck half open, revealing a gaping circular tunnel that angled down almost thirty degrees into the heart of the mountain.

The last piston came loose with a sharp metallic clang and the door fell open lazily, exposing the full circumference of the tunnel. The entrance, it seemed, was larger than the tunnel it opened into; smaller than the corridors of the Enterprise, the circular passage was low enough that Sulu could barely stand upright without hitting his head. "Well," he said, " _This_ is going to be pleasant," and he ducked down into the opening and started his descent as the others followed him inside.

Lieutenant Uhura was no stranger to such environments. As a child she'd visited the catacombs of Ancient Rome and the tombs of the Pharaohs in Egypt. In high school she'd explored the underground rivers of Yucatan and the ancient city of Chichen Itza, and in college she'd camped out in the caves of Terra Nova just to study geology under the Master Diggers. As a graduate student, she'd spent six months crawling through the twisted and winding lava tubes of Malachi Prime, slithering through the cracks of the Iconian ruins that had been buried there for millennia. She knew by now that primitive civilizations dug into the ground because it was often safer there than on the surface, where the cold darkness of the cave could shelter them from predators, the elements of a turbulent world, even from the radiation of the cosmos sleeting invisibly down on them from the sky. She was much more comfortable here in the caves than any of her colleagues could be.

Colleagues like Doctor Elizabeth Danar, who had pressed herself against the downward sloping walls of the tunnel as if she was expecting a thresher maw to come screaming out of the tunnel after them. "What are we looking for down here, anyway?" she asked, shining her tricorder's light into the inky blackness below.

Up ahead of them all, Lieutenant Sulu answered over his shoulder, "Spock says the Talosians are primarily subterranean dwellers. All their most valuable possessions are buried underground."

"How does that help us, exactly?"

Lieutenant Uhura sighed, "Think about it. Any written records, weapons, technology, any special equipment that might still be working, it'll all be stored down here. It'll help us to better understand what we're dealing with here."

Danar perked up slightly, "It might help us understand how their telepathy works if we see how their devices are configured."

"That too," Uhura said.

The tunnel leveled off at a flat wide landing with two tunnels branching off to either side. Sulu scanned down both directions with his tricorder, and found that both tunnels opened into natural caverns that extended beyond the range of his detection. One cavern was partially filled with water, the other meandered back and forth before extended out of range. "Zhara, Hendorf, check these two tunnels," he said, gesturing at the openings, "We'll proceed deeper and see what's there."

The two security officers veered into the left tunnel first, heading in the direction of the flowing water. This made sense, Sulu thought; the previous landing parties had discovered that a semi-aquatic environment was an important part of the Talosian early lifecycle, so they were probably going to check and see if the reservoirs were still in use.

From far behind the they again heard a faint southern accent and the grumbling voice, "If the Talosians dug these tunnels for themselves, this is probably the tallest passageway in this entire complex."

Sulu grinned, but didn't answer. Doctor McCoy had a way of venting his frustrations that made everyone else in the room feel better about themselves just for not being in his shoes.

"My scans say this tunnel comes to an end another fifty meters down the slope," Uhura said, looking at her tricorder screen, "Can't tell what else is down there, but..."

"Doctor McCoy!" Lieutenant Zhara's voice echoed through the tunnel just as he passed it. He paused a moment and waited until the small lithe security guard with the pixie haircut rounded the bend and glared at him with eyes like a phaser lock. "We've got work you."

McCoy read the subtext easily enough: his whole purpose for being here was to conduct field inspections of Talosian bodies to get some idea of what exactly was killing them. "Swell," he grumbled, and started into the tunnel after her. Zhara winked at him and nodded back down the tunnel towards the reservoir. "Look on the bright side. You don't have to go any deeper."

"Huh... I guess that's true!" He followed her down the tunnel with a little extra bounce in his step and then both of them vanished into the darkness.

Sulu inched deeper into the main tunnel, scanning ahead with his tricorder and the LED light that was somehow becoming less and less useful the deeper they went. Finally the tunnel leveled out and widened into a small chamber that contained a small stone table in the center of it and a low wide archway against one wall. Beyond that archway, a perfectly flat floor and a perfectly flat ceiling separated by just five and a half feet stretched out into a sea of impossible darkness. Sulu leaned thorough the archway and scanned into the blackness as far as his instrument could read. It was exactly as it appeared: a vast flat room stretching out as far as the eye could see, as if someone had nearly sliced the entire mountain in half and then raised it five and a half feet in a single piece.

"This might be the place," Sulu said, and squatted down low to duck through the archway. Doctor Danar initially waited for Uhura to go through first, but in an instant the idea of going into this new space without someone friendly behind her lost its appeal and she ducked in after Sulu without hesitation. Uhura followed last, moments before all three of them heard Sulu ask, "Where's that light coming from?"

"What light?" Danar asked. She started to look around but saw only blackness.

Uhura assumed that Sulu was looking at something that he could only see from his angle, something obscured by an object they hadn't noticed yet. She moved towards him until she was right next to his shoulder...

And a faint halo of light appeared directly in front of them as if it had been triggered by a switch. "Wow... what?" she took a step back, and the light disappeared. Another step forward and it was there again. "Trippy!"

"It does that to me too," Sulu said. Then he realized something and gasped, "You can't see it now? I can."

"What if this is one of their mental illusions?" Doctor Danar frowned, pointing the tricorder at the source of the light as she stepped towards it. At the exact same moment the light reappeared, her tricorder picked up a heat source from the same direction. "Bet you a week's pay that's a Talosian hiding in plain sight."

Uhura fixed her attention on the green light for a moment, then panned her tricorder around, illuminating the ceiling and the floor in a circle around her. "I'm not seeing any signage or inscriptions in here. That's unusual for this level of engineering sophistication."

Sulu looked at her in surprise, "This cave system doesn't seem that sophisticated to me."

"Look again, Hikaru. This is an artificial chamber with a reinforced ceiling. It would have been tricky for _our_ engineers to tunnel out something like this."

"But there are no vertical supports," Sulu said, "No walls, no columns..."

"I know. It's weird..."

"They might have eroded away with time," Danar asked behind them.

"Maybe..." Sulu took a deep breath and started moving towards the halo of green light. He couldn't be sure, exactly, how big it was or how far away it was, and he soon realized it was because he could not completely see the floor or the ceiling that far into the room. It was just a green light glowing through shadows that it somehow failed to illuminate on its own.

Danar followed close behind him and Uhura began panning her tricorder around in a circular sweep, spiraling the ground and walls and ceiling to make sure her instruments covered every inch of the room right up to the archway they'd come through. She repeated the same scan twice, once in pure acoustic mode and then as a dynamic chemical analysis, letting the tricorder's spectrometers pick through the chemical composition of its surroundings. It was in this last mode that the tricorder's screen suddenly showed a burst of activity in its otherwise tranquil line graph: seven distinct peaks appeared, bouncing and dancing up and down as she moved the tricorder and continuing to oscillate even when she didn't. "Got an odd reading on my dyna-scanner."

"I see it too," Danar said, watching watching the lines jump on her own tricorder a moment later, "Any ideas?"

Before Uhura could answer, Sulu was already asking, "Do you _smell_ that?"

Uhura sniffed the air and then her eyebrow rose, "Smells like ozone."

"Really?" Danar switched modes on her tricorder, switching from electromagnetic readings to chemical trace. The device started pulling air through its built-in spectrometers and displaying the results in a new graphic on the screen, showing elemental and chemical signatures on a bar graph. In a handful of seconds, the graph flickered and the tricorder flashed a message over the top of the readout that almost sent Danar running. "Nanites."

Sulu spun on her, eyes wide, " _What_?"

"Eight hundred parts per million, and rising fast. Density increased by four hundred percent the moment we went through that entrance."

"A swarm, then," Uhura said, "Like the thing that attacked the Enterprise over Doppelganger."

"I don't know if they're exactly the same, but the composition is similar. We're standing in a fog of nanoparticles with the same basic molecular structure."

"Let me try something..." Sulu was switching his tricorder to back to its electromagnetic scanner as he answered, "Yeah... and there's that same Z-band carrier wave. If it's not the same technology, it's something _very_ similar."

"Could there be Talosians in the tunnel with us?" asked Uhura.

Sulu switched his tricorder to acoustic mode for a moment, then a dynamic scan for biological markers before answering, "No recent activity. The Talosians here probably died years ago."

"Assuming they were ever _alive_ ," Danar said, panning the tricorder's light around in a circle, "This place looks more like a _tomb_."

"This Z-band reading gets stronger in _that_ direction," Sulu added. His tricorder was now pointed directly at the faint green light source beckoning to them in the distance... whatever distance that happened to be.

Danar said, "I don't think we should be here, Lieutenant."

"It'll be alright," Sulu said, walking towards the green light, "But keep your phasers ready, just in case."

"In case of _what_? In case the swarm of tiny alien robots we are currently standing in decides to _eat_ us?"

"You read the report, Danar. They can't affect macroscopic changes unless they form macroscopic structures first. So when they decide to eat us, they'll have form themselves into something with teeth. Which, _if_ they do, we can shoot it."

"We're getting closer," Uhura said, reading the Z-band signal on her tricorder. Then her light glinted off of something ahead of them and a shape began to form. "What's all that?"

There was something in the middle of the room, a jumble of random shapes that seemed to be piled on top of each other in no particular pattern or order. Sulu pointed his tricorder at it and let the light attachment illuminate it for him.

It was a pile of _bodies_. Some of them were desiccated and mummified, rotting flesh beneath cracked and decaying exoskeletons. Some of them were fresh enough that might still have been alive, though most of them had left their shells behind long ago and their abdomens were withered and grey. They were a jumble of arms and legs and twisted limbs as if the entire mass of them had been trying to squeeze into the smallest space possible and then collectively died that way in the middle of that effort.

"What am I looking at?" Sulu asked, "Mass grave?"

Uhura moved off from the entrance to cover it with her phaser while Doctor Danar moved across the chamber, taking up a position close to the pile of bodies in case something dangerous was hiding in it. Sulu drew his phaser with his free hand and knelt down near the edge of the pile, poking at one of the bodies with the tip of his weapon. With even this slight touch, the Talosian corpse lolled to the side and rolled out of position, exposing three other bodies beneath it that began to slide awkwardly against each other as whatever nooks and crannies held them in place began to give way. "I do not think these bodies could have been posed this way."

"Why not? Looks like they're just dumped here."

"But _look_ at them. Their limbs are all woven through and twisted up. It's like they were grasping at each other when they died. Besides, this is obviously the source of the Z-band signal we detected. Maybe the nanites compelled them to all pile up?"

"It doesn't seem like they all died at the same time," Ramirez said, moving a few of the crustacean bodies aside, "Looks like this pile has been growing over time. You notice how all the oldest bodies are on the outside?"

Sulu looked, and then he saw it himself. "The fresher corpses are deeper in." He saw something else too, though it wasn't worth mentioning just yet. The faint green glow that had initially drawn them to this spot was coming from somewhere _beneath_ the pile of bodies; they had only been able to see it before because the corpses at the very top of the pile were backlit from within by it. _Something glowing under there... machinery?_

"So the new arrivals come here and they dig there way into the center of all this, and then they die there."

"Jesus..." Danar took a few large steps back from the pile, breathing deep and trying not to breathe in the rotting fish smell of Talosian decomposition. But here too, the smell of death was seemingly overwhelmed by the smell of ozone and the stingy odor of burnt gunpowder. _The smell of nanites entering my body,_ she thought grimly. "So this is the place where Talosians go to die."

Sulu grunted. "I was just thinking that too. Is that a real thing?"

"Are you asking me?"

"I think I was asking Nyota."

"Asking me _what_?" Uhura said, turning away from the body pile and the tricorder scan.

"That's sort of a cliche, that there's a place where certain creatures go to die. Is that a thing that really happens in nature?"

Uhura turned most of her attention back to her tricorder, searching her memory as she went, "It's rare, but not unheard of. It is actually more common among sapient species as a ritualistic behavior than it is among animals acting on instinct. Syrannite Vulcans used to return to the katric shrines of their ancestors when their deaths were near. On Andoria, the Disciples of Regret practice Jia'Halrie, in where a dying warrior breaks into the tombs of his ancestors and performs a ritual self-mummification."

"So you mean it's a way for dying people to dispose of themselves and save their relatives the trouble?"

Uhura shook her head, "It's more like an attempt by the dying to reconnect with those who have already died. It's a way of preparing for the end of life by choosing your place among the dead and then taking that place of your own free will."

Danar knelt down next to her, looking at her tricorder screen and looking at the bodies themselves as if searching for clues.

"What would that mean for a race of telepaths like these?" Sulu asked, "I mean, can they _sense_ the deaths of their comrades at a distance? Or long after the fact?"

"You know what?" Danar straightened up, then slowly backed away from the pile, raising her tricorder and pointing it at the pile, "I have an idea."

Sulu smiled, "Well, I'm all ears."

"However sophisticated the Talosians' telepathy may be, the ability to strongly affect sentient beings at a distance requires a _massive_ amount of transmission power. A psionic field or a neural-electrical induction pulse can require tens of kilowatts even at close range, and their effects scale at the square of the distance. On the other hand, we have seen the Talosians influencing our officers at distances of several tens of meters..."

Uhura looked up suddenly, "You don't think the Talosians can generate the necessary power."

"I really don't. Most species capable of long-distance telepathy usually have specialized organs for generating the necessary electrical charge. Betazoid and Aenar telepaths both have charge-generating organs capable of produce up to seven thousand joules. But we haven't seen that in any of the specimens we've examined. There's no evidence of similar organs _anywhere_ Talosian anatomy."

"Not in these either?" Uhura asked, gesturing at the pile of bodies.

"None that I can detect. Which suggests their abilities may be enhanced artificially." Danar gestured around the room, "Didn't that Trader say something about them having a subspace transmitter? That might be the source of the Z-band signal."

 _Might also be the source of that glow,_ Sulu thought. "Alright..." he snapped open his communicator and paged McCoy's set, "Doctor what's your status?"

"I'm in need of a new line of work."

Sulu rolled his eyes and repeated the question. " _Besides_ that. What's your status?"

"Hundreds of bodies here. Mostly hatchlings, a few juveniles. All dead."

"Any idea what killed them?"

"Starved to death. Seems like the juveniles were cannibalizing the bodies of the dead, but it didn't get them very far. There's also something like four hundred unhatched eggs here but not a single adult in sight."

"It looks like all the adults are gathered down here," Sulu said, "Maybe they abandoned the children when things got rough?"

"That looks like it might be the case. Except that would kind of suggest this whole thing happened pretty suddenly, right? I mean parents don't just dump their children in a hellish nightmare like this..."

"Unless they convince themselves the hellish nightmare is actually a safe and supportive nursery where the kids will be safe for a while. As for why the parents never _came back_ for the children," he looked at the pile of bodies again, "There's no food down here, no water. I'm guessing they _also_ starved to death."

"Have I told you how much I _hate_ this planet?"

Sulu nodded in agreement, "I think we're almost done here. Gather a few specimens and head back to the surface. We'll meet you in half an hour."

"Got it." Doctor McCoy, currently standing in the midst of a massive sprawl of twisted and contorted Talosian bodies, killed the signal from his end and tucked the communicator back into his belt. Not that he was happy with the prospect, but the need for it was clear. If the entire Talosian species was facing extinction, Starfleet was going to want to know why. "The most recent corpses should have the most promise," he said, and turning to Zhara and Hendorf added, "Whip out your antgravs. This is the nasty part."

Down below, Uhura and Danar were beginning to pull the pile of bodies apart, digging their way to the green light source beneath it all. Once, twice, three times Danar thought she saw movement out of the corner of her eye and turned in that direction only to notice the same inky darkness, the floor and ceiling fading smoothly into the too-near oblivion. "We should have brought floods. It's far too dark in here."

"No it isn't," Uhura said, with a casualness that belied the incredible creepiness of his words, "It's the nanites. The swarm is thick enough to block out visible light."

"You're kidding me..." As a test, Sulu pulled a small device the size of a gumdrop out of his equipment belt, pinched it in his fingers until he felt it pop, then tossed it away in a random direction. The flare lit up like a floodlight as it tumbled through the air, then dimmed, then vanished into a veil of darkness just ten meters away before it had a chance to hit the ground.

Over many years of practice, of slipping into and out of dangerous situations, in dealing with people and things that were not what they appeared to be, Lieutenant Sulu had learned to trust his instincts. He had learned a long time ago to pay special attention to that tingly feeling in the back of your throat when you know something terrible is close by but your conscious mind is not fully aware of it. The feeling of being in a bad place, a place where only bad things could possibly happen.

That was the feeling Sulu had now, and while he couldn't see what was threatening him, his Starfleet training and his experience with the Talosians had given him plenty of grounds to take a guess. "Hey... Liz..."

The science officer's attention was fixed on the pile of bodies in front of them. The arms and legs were all intertwined as if the bodies had been in the process of climbing through each other when they died. It was if they were all attracted to something that lay _beneath_ the pile, and had probably died after reaching their goal.

"How come nobody ever removes the corpses?" Asked Uhura as she pulled another one from the pile and rolled it on its side.

"It's the same with that nursery upstairs," Danar said, "The Talosians recreate reality around them. They keep themselves from seeing what they don't want to see."

Uhura nodded in understanding, "Then maybe they didn't see this pile. They _imagined_ it was something else."

And Sulu thought, _What could be so valuable that they would ignore everything else to come looking for it?_ It had to be something was something that compelled all of them to come here, something that held universal appeal. Perhaps even something that they thought would really solve their problems. It was something much too valuable for them to easily let it go. He briefly recalled that the Novans had something a lot like that in their underground cities, a shrine of some kind to honor the memories of... _Uh oh._ "Hey, Liz," Sulu began, "There's something that worries me-"

"My god, look at this!" Uhura was pulling the last of the corpses away as the shape of the light source became visible. The green glow was coming from a bank of large circular LED switches on the top of a large metallic cube almost a half a meter across. It was covered in a layer of mold and grey, evil-smelling slime that was probably the dripping runoff from an entire generation of decomposing corpses laying on top of it. The cube itself was made of a sickly-looking green metal, probably some kind of copper alloy that had oxidized over centuries of neglect. Though solidly built, it was not perfectly smooth: its faces had patterns of intersecting lines that ran mostly diagonal and parallel, like etchings of 20th century circuit boards. A bundle of three thick cables was connected to one corner of it, one of which was warmer than the others and was probably feeding it electrical power.

"This is definitely the source of our Z-band signal," Danar said, glancing down at her tricorder. "Okay. So here's my idea. It's obvious that the Talosians can't generate a psionic field on their own. So they must be using some kind of artificial means to amplify their thought transmissions. Like a communications relay or something."

"Something like _this_?" Uhura pointed to the cube.

" _Exactly_ like this. It's no wonder they're drawn to it when they're dying. The weaker they get, the harder it is for them to sustain a shared illusion. They get closer to it to get a stronger signal and then they starve to death because they're too weak to go back up to the surface for food."

Uhura nodded, "The illusion of survival is more important to them than the real thing."

"Right. It's just like those Iconian ruins on Malachi Prime. How all the fossilized bodies are closest to the command center..."

"... because that's what they wanted to protect most," Uhura nodded, "Even accidental mummies burry themselves with their treasures. That makes sense."

"Can you two stop for a moment?" Sulu was trying to keep the urgency out of his voice, but as long as he was sounding calm he couldn't break into Danar's thought stream. Actually, Sulu wasn't so sure of his own theory, considering Danar seemed unconcerned by it. And getting her attention to ask her about it seemed like a waste of time. But there were ways he could test the theory himself...

"There's an easy way to know for sure," Danar said, "If we send a Z-band transmission to the cube on the right frequency, it should amplify it and send it back to us."

"What?" Uhura looked at her quizzically, "That makes no sense. If this is a signal relay, it'll be programmed to respond to Talosian thought patterns. We don't know its transmission protocols, what it keys on..."

"Talosians aren't machines, though. They probably haven't memorized the protocols either. In the fact, I'd bet this nanite swarm all around us is part of the device. It's probably helping to relay their thoughts back and forth through the amplifier."

"Well then, if you send a Z-band signal, it'll affect the _nanites_ too, won't it?"

Danar thought about this, "I suppose it might. Only one way to find... out... um... Sulu?" her train of thought was finally interrupted by the appearance of Sulu's tricorder less than a centimeter from her temple and the Lieutenant's deep frown. She hadn't noticed him gradually approaching her, step by step, frowning each time he came closer, any more than she'd noticed his attempts to raise concerns earlier. Now, however, he was impossible to ignore: he looked as if he had just discovered an armed photon torpedo lodged in Danar's hair. "Sulu, what _are_ you doing?"

His expression was grim. "We're in trouble."

"Hey, Sulu," Doctor McCoy's voice crackled out of his communicator, "Before we head back up, I want to check out the other tunnel with Zhara and Hendorf..."

Sulu snapped open his communicator and barked, "Negative, Doctor. Drop whatever you're doing and return to the surface _immediately_."

Lieutenant Hendorf answered, "There a problem, Lieutenant?"

"Yes. Yes there is. Standby." He snapped the communicator shut and moved closer to Danar, "Doctor-"

"And I thought _I_ was jittery," Danar said, taking a small step back, "What's gotten into you?"

"I don't have time to explain, Doctor. We need to get out of here right away."

"Lieutenant," Danar smiled softly, "You _really_ need to calm down. This underground cavern is-"

"Probably safer than any place on the surface," Sulu finished for her, "Which all three of us know from experience. You know what else I know? I know all about the Iconian ruins on Malachi Prime, and the cave dwellers on Terra Nova."

Danar nodded, "Well sure, so do I. Why is that relevant?"

"Because _I've_ never been to Terra Nova. And neither have _you_."

Danar's eyes widened. "Holy shit, you're right..."

"So wait," Uhura raised a brow, "You two are both experiencing _my_ memories?"

"Not yours," Sulu said, " _Lieutenant Zhara_ grew up on Terra Nova. And Hendorf went to Chichen Itza when he was a kid. That's what made him want to join Starfleet. And Liz, I happen to know you're the only person in Starfleet who's _ever_ been to Malachi Prime. That entire system went under quarantine a year after you left."

"So then..." Danar turned back to the cube, then back to Sulu, "So _what_...?"

"That cube is scanning our memories," Sulu said, "And it's broadcasting them back to us. Which would be bad enough, except that it's being very _selective_ about what it's broadcasting."

"Selective?" Uhura raised a brow, "You mean it's not sending back everything?"

"Only what it... well... what _they_ want us to see."

"How can you tell?" Uhura asked.

"They _who_? The Talosians?" Danar looked at the pile of bodies all around them, "They're dead, aren't they?"

"Of course they are," Sulu said, "Nyota, do you have that antigrav rig?"

She flinched at the question, then realized its significance, and knelt down and pulled the two portable antigrav handles from her field kit. "Are we taking the cube with us?"

Sulu ignored the question. "Lock it up for me, will you?"

"Okay..." uncomprehending, and more than a little anxious, Uhura folded the antigravs out to full size and attached them to the cube, one on each side. They attached to the surface of the cube and then wrapped it in a subspace field that soon reduced its mass to almost nothing; it was light as a feather now and could be hoisted by a single person holding a single handle if need be. "Got it..."

"Okay. So. Whatever you do, _don't panic_."

Danar and Uhura traded a puzzled look, and then said to Sulu in unison, "Panic from _what_?"

Sulu walked around the back of the cube and looked at the thick electrical cables on the back of the cube. He reached into his pack and pulled out a long sleek handle twenty centimeters in length and pressed down a switch on its side. The handle shuddered in his hand, and piece by piece, segment by segment, the handle unfolded itself into Magnum Pro Series NZ350 competition-grade Katana: one hundred centimeters of self-sharpening lunar titanium alloy wielded by the hands of Starfleet Academy's two-time Continental Kendo champion.

Sulu raised the sword over his head and swung it through the air in a wide, sweeping circular path whose upwards orbit crossed right through the spot where the three cables connected to the cube. In an instant, the indicator lights on top of the cube went dark.

Sulu grasped the true reality of his surroundings for the first time and grappled with a sense of foreboding he hadn't been allowed to notice before. This entire space smelled of death and despair and had all the trappings of a mass grave in a nuclear holocaust in the middle of a famine during a pandemic. Where moments ago he had felt comfortable and at home here, he now saw that this was a _terrifying_ place that looked dangerous and unsafe and all of his instincts were telling him he didn't want to be here.

There was a rustling sound from somewhere. A jostling, stirring, the sound of feet and fingers and claws moving rapidly as dozens of not-actually-dead creatures began shifting positions. Then those indistinct sounds of movement were drowned by the screaming of hundreds of voices. The screams came from from every corner of the room, from the tunnel they'd come through, from chambers in the distance they hadn't seen, and even from the pile of bodies they had moved to get to the device. They screamed in anguish and rage, in voices that were choked with decay or pumped with the alien equivalent of adrenaline. They screamed a single word in such perfect unison they might have been a choir group: "No!" The screams grew louder, less simultaneous, but caucophonous and deafening as they formed words, _"The memories!"_ They screamed in broken, scattered unity, _"Give them back now_!"


	11. Chapter 11

**PRIORITIES**

Talos-IV, High Orbit  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.41

\- 1016 hours -  
The Constitution class flagships were equipped with eighteen Rocketdyne PX-55 pulsejets, strategically placed around the ship for attitude control and fine course correction. Each pulsejet was built around a fusion reactor the size of a schoolbus and individually produced more thrust than the first stage of a Saturn-V rocket. The ship's impulse engines were more powerful still, and at full thrust could produce in one second more explosive power than was ever expended in three world wars. And yet even with all this thrust at his command, Ensign Tyler thought the Enterprise felt sluggish as he tried to maneuver into its final position at the apopsis of its new, higher orbit.

On the other hand, he was thankful that the ship wasn't too responsive. It made it easier to turning the ship's "nose" in the direction Chekov had calculated would put the strongest part of their deflector beam directly across the transceivers of subspace beacon Vega-686, now four hundred light years away in the inconceivable vastness of space. The big dish had just enough range to reach that far on a subspace band, and Vega-686 was just new enough to reach as far back as Earth with only a second or two of time delay from the hundreds-of-lightyears propagation through the Aether. Even with the computer doing most of the work, it was a hard target to hit; Tyler felt as if he was trying to point a needle on his helm console at a target the size of a penny fifty miles away by _turning the entire ship._ Most academy cadets and even some officers would have quit in protest over such a blatantly unfair and impossible test.

Chekov and Tyler did it in three and a half minutes. "We have position lock on beacon Vega-686, Commander. Ready to transmit."

"Put in the call, Lieutenant," Spock ordered, settling into the command chair, "Standard contact protocol, Priority One."

"Sending, Sir," Lieutenant Hannity said, and snapped a row of switches on the top of her console to bring the big dish up to full power.

In the context of things, it was almost ridiculous. A starship the size of a small city, using one of the most powerful radiotelescopes ever flown in space, blasting a subspace signal across hundreds of light years at amplitudes high enough to push a small moon out of its orbit, just to place a perfectly ordinary wireless communications request to a desk terminal in an officer somewhere in Downtown San Francisco. Somewhere in that office, a communications technician was receiving a message on his terminal that USS Enterprise was making a connection request, that it was on a live channel, and that the latency was so huge that it must be calling in from the farthest edges of explored space. That technician then paged his supervisor, who almost choked on his coffee when he realized what the page meant, and then rushed down a hall and around a corner to inform the only man in the building who could approve the request.

Six minutes later and five thousand kilometers away, a priority order and targeting data was received by Starfleet's "Epsilon Omega" subspace telescope, the glowing parabolic reflector the size of a football stadium that now dominated the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in the African Union. The transmitter slewed to its new target, powered up its field coils and began to transmit a digital tightbeam signal into the farthest reaches of explored space.

And all the way back to the Enterprise, the outgoing signal carried the voice and the image of a small, square-faced black man seated at a cherrywood desk in a humble, nondescript office. He tried to look official and in control, and instead, as usual, came off looking like somebody's favorite uncle. Vice Admiral Richard Barnett had held the office of Commander in Chief of Starfleet for a little under a year and he still looked like he was only filling in until somebody better came along. "Commander Spock," Barnett said, smiling pleasantly as his face appeared on the viewscreen, "This is an unexpected pleasure."

"The pleasure is all mine, Admiral," Spock began plainly, "However, this is not intended as a social call. During an unscheduled stop in the Talos Star Group, one of our away teams has encountered a hostile force and we are presently engaged in rescue operations."

Barnett's eyebrows jumped, "Hostile force... Any casualties?"

"We don't know yet, Sir. Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Carol Marcus are missing, believed to be held captive. We are attempting to recover them."

"Ah... Right..." Barnett shifted his weight awkwardly, frowning uncomfortable. He suddenly looked as if he had just been caught cheating on his wife by a tabloid reporter. "You're going to ask me about your diversion order."

Spock paused for a moment, considering this. He took the conversation two steps further back, "I wish to request clarification of the nature of this order. A Code Two priority would seem to suggest an immanent state of organized hostilities between the Federation and a foreign government."

"It's not quite as simple as that, Commander, but you have the gist of it. Admiral Mendez will brief you on the situation when you reach Starbase Eleven."

"A full briefing would be helpful, Admiral, however it would be _more_ helpful if you could explain the nature of the threat embodied in the Code Two condition."

Barnett frowned, "You don't need to know that right now. All you need to know is that you've been ordered to proceed to Starbase Eleven. I understand you are attempting to rescue missing crewmembers. I can accept the necessary delay, _provided_ you get underway as ordered once your business is concluded. One way or the other."

Spock's eyebrow rose, "With all due respect, Admiral, I disagree. The very purpose of the Code Two condition is to alert Starfleet commanders to anticipate a possible act of war by an aggressive foreign military. We cannot adequately prepare for such action if we do not even know the identity of the threat."

"That may be..." looking deeply uncomfortable, Barnett folded his arms and slouched backwards, sitting on something that wasn't visible from the camera's angle but was almost certainly a desk in the middle of the room he was in, "But I can't take that risk."

Spock suppressed his annoyance, even as he struggled to understand its origins. Admiral Barnett had been the Commandant of Starfleet Academy for most of Spock's post-graduate years there. The man he'd replaced had been flexible, adaptable, professional, and efficient; Admiral Barnett was none of those things, and it was manifesting strongly in the present conversation. He would withhold the necessary information from Spock, not because there was any particular danger of disclosing it, but because of the possibility that revealing that information might in some way compromise his career or force him to answer difficult political questions later on.

In short, Barnett was engaged in some preemptive ass-covering and was playing it safe by being as secretive as possible. Which was, in Spock's estimate, illogical and dangerous in a Code 2 situation.

And perhaps Barnett knew this too on some level. His compulsive desire to cover his own ass was clashing with what little sense of duty and honor he still possessed, hence his visible discomfort. "Are you willing to assume responsibility if I am forced to open fire on a potential threat on the off chance that it _might_ belong to a potential enemy vessel?"

Barnett took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Spock braced himself for what he suddenly realized would be bad news. "Four days ago, our listening post at Epsilon Two intercepted a series of frantic transmissions in the clear from the Omega Leonis system."

"The Klingon homeworld," Spock said, stiffening.

"The very same. Mostly distress signals and desperate calls for reinforcement, but all indications are that a massive military campaign is underway in the Klingon home system. A Federation ship made a close flyby of the system, and they confirmed that Kronos is now being subjected to large scale orbital bombardment by a massive Romulan task force. The Klingon fleet is responding, but they're taking heavy losses and their main military command centers at Ty'Gokor and and Zu'Kho have already been compromised."

Spock cringed as he knew what was coming next, "Is there any estimate to how long the Klingons can hold out?"

Barnett nodded, "We're projecting six weeks. Less, if you believe Klingon propaganda about their overall fleet strength, which I personally don't. The ground game is another matter, but that assumes the Romulans will even bother to invade the planet instead of just glassing it from orbit."

On the bridge of the Enterprise, it was as if the air had been sucked out of the room. Ensign Chekov was pretending to be a statue and Ensign Tyler was making a powerful effort just to remind himself to keep breathing.

Spock shifted awkwardly in the command chair and managed a dispassionate, "Do you anticipate renewed Romulan aggression against the Federation?"

For his part, Barnett's sarcasm was almost Vulcan in its aloofness. "Do you anticipate rain in Seattle?"

For a man who normally had a low tolerance for nonsequitors, Spock took this in stride. "Then I assume our redeployment is in anticipation of the expansion of the Romulan-Klingon war into Federation colonies."

"More than that, we're worried the _Klingons_ might try expanding in a search for war-fighting resources to use against the Romulans. And we're already seeing reports of refugees leaving the system in unprecedented numbers, mostly heading for the frontier, but who knows if they won't go even farther? And Klingon Empire wasn't exactly a picture of stability even _before_ Praxis blew up. Various outer colonies with strong local militias are likely to splinter off into independent states in the absence of a central government. In the chaos, a few of those colonies might decide to go pirating local shipping lanes or form alliances with some dangerous actors closer to Federatoin space. You get the idea. This Romulan invasion has the potential to turn a dangerous culture into an _interstellar pestilence_."

"I doubt the Klingons would appreciate that analogy."

"I don't give a damn what the Klingons appreciate. I want every ship available to monitor activity along the Klingon frontier and try to get a handle on the situation as it evolves. Even if we get no trouble from the Klingons, a resurgent Romulus is the stuff of our worst nightmares."

No one on the Enterprise needed no reminder of this. The Romulans made frequent appearances in the Academy simulators, and one not-so-simulated appearance a few weeks ago in the melee over Doppelganger. Even before the destruction of Vulcan, Spock had participated in dozens of wargame scenarios at the Academy, based on the best and worst case scenarios ranging from measured, covert aggression along the neutral zone to a full-scale breakout with a massive campaign of conquest.

A Romulan invasion of Kronos was not something the Federation had even remotely planned for; the Klingon Empire was too large, too powerful and too aggressive for them to be the Star Emperor's first target, or for that matter even their second target. Of course Starfleet was anxious; they were now thrust into uncharted territory far more unpredictable than even the most exotic regions of the galaxy.

"Admiral," Spock's thoughts snapped back to the present, even as the idea suddenly occurred to him, "There is another matter I wish to clarify."

Barnett's eyes narrowed, "Make it quick, Commander. This call is costing Starfleet seven hundred credits a minute."

"Then I will be brief. Are you familiar with a vessel called USS Victory?"

"Victory? Well, there was an HMS Victory during the First Romulan War. Cargo ship converted to a missile carrier. More recently though I..." Barnett's face darkened, "Now... wait... I'm not sure if this is related, but the expense reports for Admiral Marcus' strategic defense push..."

"Project Phalanx," Spock said, remembering the briefs. Phalanx called for the reorganization of fleet priorities after the destruction of Vulcan. The plan's details were shrouded in secrecy, but the formation of a "special tactical response squadron" was one of its key selling points. The existence of - but not the capabilities - of the Dreadnought class starship had been another.

"At full implementation," Barnett went on, "Phalanx would have produced about thirty new starships, organized into two rapid-action groups. The center of those groups would be the starships Dreadnought, Entente, Victory, and Vengeance. Since Phalanx has been scrapped, the first two Dreadnoughts are accounted for and are in the process of being fitted out for exploration missions. And you know better than I do what happened to the Vengeance. _But Victory..._ "

Spock rose slowly to his feet. "Admiral, are you saying there is a Dreadnought-class starship presently at large in Federation space?"

"Actually, Mister Spock, there are _two_ Dreadnoughts still unaccounted for. The Victory, and a second incomplete vessel called USS Valiant that procurement documents deliberately mislabeled as a 'frigate.' We're also investigating a sudden loss of communications with the starships Exeter and Constellation, both of which were last sighed in the vicinity of Io station without explanation."

"Am I to understand," Spock said slowly, "That there are _four_ Federation starships currently unaccounted for in relation to Project Phalanx?"

"You are to understand," Barnett said sternly, "That Starfleet is _investigating_ the whereabouts of four starships whose disappearance may or may not be connected to the dissolution of Project Phalanx. On the other hand, space is _vast_ , and ships do sometimes go missing."

Spock appreciated the irony of this statement. It was a truism, of course, that in the vastness of space it was easy for a starship to simply disappear without a trace, the fate of crew and cargo remaining unknown for decades until some lucky traveler should happen to stumble upon its broken wreck in some out-of-the-way planet like Talos IV. But history also reflected that some disappearances required a certain amount of administrative help; a misfiled report or an omitted log entry, a forged damage report. A freighter captain six months behind on his lease might report his ship destroyed in an asteroid collision only to have that same ship - with a new paint job and a forged transponder code - show up in port six weeks later under new ownership.

He almost couldn't help but ask, "Ships like SS Columbia or USS Archon?"

Barnett's face turned stony. "I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that."

"Yes, I expect you are."

"Commander Spock, you are _dangerously_ close to insubordination."

"No, Sir. I am dangerously close to a race of highly effective telepaths who have recently had contact with a Dreadnought class starship under the control of Section Thirty One. As the operators of that ship are likely in continuous contact with the inhabitants of this planet, it stands to reason that I am _also_ dangerously close to the ship itself. To that end, I wish to officially request assistance from any starships in the area that might be able to help us combat the potential threat of-"

"Request denied. Your best course of action right now is to recover your people and then get the hell out of there. Beyond that, I'm invoking Starfleet General Order Seven. Talos Four will be declared a Category Four civilization and all contact will be prohibited upon your departure, enforceable through all possible means."

Spock raised a brow, "There has never been a verified Category Four civilization in Federation history."

"Well, we've got one now. You have your orders, Commander, and I expect you to follow them. Is that understood?"

"Understood, Sir."

"Good. Starfleet out."

The transmission ended, the canted delta of Starfleet filled the screen with a summary of the transmission time and a checksum printed across the bottom.

"Take us back to Talos Four, Mister Tyler," Spock said, slowly rising from his chair, "Lieutenant Hannity, inform shuttle crews to prepare two Class-R and six Class-F shuttles for surface operations. We will begin..."

"Sir!" Hannity sat bolt upright in her chair, fingers tapping her earpiece, "Message from the away team, Sir. It's badly garbled, but it sounds like they're under attack."

If Spock was human, he would have sighed and said something sarcastic about the universe's sense of timing. Since Spock was only half human, he gave a low wistful grunt and said, "I find this entire planet _insufferable_."

Plotting the orbit change to take the Enterprise back into position over Bo'Shan, Chekov muttered, "Yah... me too."

.

Talos-IV, Southern Hemisphere  
Bo'Shan Mountain Pass  
Stardate 2261.41

\- 1036 hours -  
The Bo'Shan trading post was already in pandemonium by he time Lieutenant Zhara reached the top of the tunnel entrance. The tents had burst open like volcanos, spilling a payload of volatile little crablike beings into the air that were even now rushing towards them like a biblical plague. Although the translator gave them all different voices, it was clear they were all speaking in unison, and the first thing Zhara heard when was forty five synthesized voices all howling, _"You're no merchants! You're here to steal my memories!"_

"Shields up!" Zhara shouted as McCoy and Hendorf came out of the tunnel behind her, "Phasers on stun!" And she took her own advice, checking the energy level readout on her life support belt to make sure her shield capacitor still had a full charge. With her free hand she flipped open her communicator and shouted, "Away team to Enterprise, we're under attack! Request emergency beamout!"

There'd been no response before, which Zhara had attributed to interference from the rocks in the mountain or from the nanomachines swarming in the cave. This time, however, the response was loud and clear: "Standby, away team. We'll coming back into position at full impulse power. We'll be in transporter range in eleven minutes thirty seconds."

"Copy that! Don't stop for coffee on the way here!"

The Talosian traders had begun to rush like a feeding frenzy, although at this point they weren't moving as quickly as Zhara had feared. Years of sickness and malnutrition meant that after the initial adrenaline surge they were reduced to staggering, stomping, lurching, limping, in some cases even rolling. Most of them were carrying some kind of pipes or clubs in their claws, or at least that's what they appeared to be before some of the Talosians pointed those pipes at her security team and fired them like pistols. Zhara felt impacts around her feet and the snap of projectiles zipping through the air around her; there was a dull thump in the side of her thigh and a sparkling of airborne static told her one of their bullets had bounced off her overshield.

So the fight was on.

Zhara picked her first target and fired from the hip in short, rapid trigger pulls. A half dozen crackling blue phaser pulses pummeled one of the traders about his head and abdomen and the little alien went down with sickening crash, like the sound of a skeleton being dropped from the ceiling. Hendorf picked a second target and aimed more carefully, letting the phasers' targeting software line up precision shots with each trigger pull. Two different shooting styles, but with the same result: a dozen traders went down in seconds, most of them collapsing in heaps, landing on their faces or on their sides with their legs in the air and their bodies twisted in what must have been very unnatural poses.

McCoy winced, realizing that even the stun setting could be fatal in their condition. "Aim for their legs," he shouted, both to his own team and the new team that had just joined them, "Try to drop them without hurting them!"

Hendorf growled, "How about you whip out _your_ phaser and show us how it's done?"

McCoy growled, "I'm a doctor, not a gunslinger!"

That particular thought could not be furthest from the mind of Lieutenant Sulu, one hundred and forty meters underground, who suddenly found himself in the center of a collapsing wall of very angry Talosians. The ones in the underground were in even worse shape that the ones on the surface in that only a few dozen of them could even _move._ But the ones that _could_ move seemed to fill the entire room, and now Sulu, with Uhura and Danar formed a circle around the cubic device and a pile of freshly-stunned Talosians, firing into the darkness as the aliens emerged from it.

Uhura thought of the old twenty first century zombie movies she used to watch when she was little, the drooling ranks of the formerly-human flesh-hungry monsters that could be deterred from their evil plans only with a shotgun blast to the face. Replacing the zombies with undead crab critters in an underground complex on an alien world... The parallel was almost funny, even if the situation wasn't.

That, plus the fact that the Talosian zombies kept _screaming_ at them. _"Those are_ my _memories!"_ howled the seven hundred odd voices in the cave, _"Give them back now!"_

"Cover me!" Sulu shouted, and rushed to the side of the cube. He slapped a control on one of the antigrav handles to put it into "float" mode and then ran around to grab the other handle. The cube lifted off the ground easily enough, but even suspended of gravity it still had _mass_. As Sulu pushed it forward he felt its inertia resist his efforts, and as it started to move he had a full understanding of just how hard it would be to slow it down.

The Talosians, he recalled, were fragile creatures.

"Let's go!" Sulu shouted, and started to push the cube towards the entrance. He kept it low to the ground, a clearance of just a few centimeters so that he could still clearly see over the top of it. Uhura and Danar came along to his sides, both firing off their phasers at anything that got close. The three of them formed a running retreat that was now picking up speed towards the tunnel entrance, and in a handful of seconds they were moving at a pace just shy of a slow jog.

There were six Talosians in front of the archway when it finally came into view. Sulu shouted for them to move, but his voice was drowned out by their frantic screaming and the sound of phaser fire. He felt a pang of regret for what was about to happen to them, and then braced himself for a jolt and followed the gliding cube into the archway. All six Talosians moved into its path to block its escape.

There was a series of crunching/thumping noises as the small crustacean bodies were slammed out of the archway into the small foyer. The cube didn't even slow down.

Sulu turned the cube so he could hold it by one handle and then tilted it so one flat surface was parallel with the sloping tunnel. Danar and Uhura emerged through the archway just behind him, firing into the darkness with their phasers. Uhura glanced at the crushed alien bodies littering the room, but didn't have time to think about it; all three of them rushed into the tunnel and began the rapid climb towards the surface.

"How much farther?" Danar asked.

"Another hundred meters up the slope," Sulu said, "Don't get careless! There might be more of them ahead of-" He saw them over the top of the cube and felt his pulse double in speed. A dozen of them, maybe more. And a few were larger than the ones they'd fought down below, or even from the ones that Kirk's team had encountered. Almost twice as large, in fact, and with larger, throbbing organs on the tops of their heads that seemed to be made of fatty tissue beneath a round and thick exoskeletal cover. _Female of the species,_ Sulu realized. _Of course! The egg-layers_ would _be bigger than the males._

The large-bodied Talosians began a march down the slope, and Sulu saw a flash of light and the sharp thunderclap of projectile weapon firing, felt and heard something bounce off the top casing of the cube just centimeters from his face. "The females are _armed!_ Watch your shields!"

Danar shouted in despair, "They're trying to cut us off!"

" _Trying_ , yes..." Sulu drew his weapon, aimed over the top of the cube and let off a burst of phaser fire into the tunnel even as he picked up his pace towards them.

One of the big females crumpled over, but six others let off a rolling salvo of gunshots as hundreds of Talosians behind them screamed, _"You won't get away from me!"_ The bullets - whatever they were made of - made dull thumps against the stone walls and high-pitched pings where they bounced off the Starfleet overshields. Uhura fired up the tunnel while Danar fired at the ones down behind them; the phaser pulses lit the whole tunnel with their blue-white light and outlined the blood vessels and nerves of the Talosians every time they hit them.

Sulu felt another pang of regret, but as before, he didn't slow down. He let the box glide forward into their paths and felt the sickening crunching/thumping impacts as a quarter ton of steel and ceramic slammed into them at a running pace. The larger aliens weren't quite so devastated than their smaller counterparts, but it still left the group of them twitching and broken on the ground like instincts crushed under a boot.

 _How many have we killed getting out of here?_ Sulu asked himself, an itch in his spine he didn't dare scratch, _How many killed themselves just trying to stop us?_

"Sulu!" Doctor McCoy was shouting over his communicator link, "Enterprise is coming into position! Get your asses up here!"

"I see them!" Uhura shouted, and then her next words were drowned out behind Danar's phaser fire and the retort of gunshots from somewhere behind them, "...hand laser to you?"

Sulu flinched and looked in her direction, "What?"

"I said, does that look like a hand la-" a bright orange pencil-thin beam of light sliced through the air, missing Uhura's head by inches. It didn't miss Doctor Danar, however, and swept diagonally across her back from her left shoulder to her right hip. The beam flared brilliantly against the boundary of her overshield, but it left a line of black scoring across her back where the laser had burned the fabric of her uniform and scorched the skin underneath. Danar twitched for a moment, turned around slowly as if wondering who or what had just slapped her on the back.

Then the laser fired again, and Danar's head rolled off her shoulders.

Sulu aimed blindly up the tunnel and fired a dozen bursts over the top of the cube. An enormous female Talosian fired back at them from a handheld weapon that on a human officer could have been mistaken for a rocket launcher. The beam flashed through the air so brightly that Sulu felt heat against his cheeks even when it _missed._

And the Talosian didn't move. Even the phaser pulses didn't seem to affect it, but simply passed right through it as if it was a holographic target. The weapon it was carrying was solid enough, though, so Sulu adjusted his aim, switched his phaser to the disruptor emitter, and fired. The oversized laser tube flashed, tumbled and then exploded like a grenade, power source discharging all at once. The explosion scattered the huge Talosian form into a granular black mist that Sulu and Uhura passed through without any resistance at all.

It wasn't vaporized, Sulu realized. The Talosian had never _really_ been there.

The voices screamed to them again from the depths, _"Thieves! Vandals! You will pay for this!"_

Sulu heard a muffled voice from higher up the tunnel, and then the voice congealed into words with a distinct southern cadence. "Hurry up, Sulu, they're shootin' at us!"

He saw him just seconds after he heard him, and moments after that he saw the circular opening of the tunnel entrance ten meters up the slope. Moments later, he emerged from the tunnel into the full light of day, standing on a shallow slope overlooking the ruined sprawl of the Bo'Shan trading post. Three dozen Talosians lay in crumpled heaps around them, the long fat tubes of their handguns scattered among them. It took him and Uhura almost all of their strength to stop the moving cube from sailing too far out away from the tunnel entrance and they finally dragged it to a stop and planted it on the rock face just outside of it.

Sulu found Lieutenant Zhara in a kneeling position behind a small flat rock, scanning back and forth with her tricorder for any signs of additional hostiles. She seemed unconcerned, and had already returned her phaser to her belt holster in safe mode. Sulu forced himself not to embrace the sense of calm that the security officer's demeanor engendered and asked him sharply, "Are we secure here?"

"Solid as a rock, Lieutenant," Zhara answered, keeping his eyes on his tricorder screen, "In fact I don't think they were ever that much of a threat to begin with..."

"Based on what?" Sulu asked. He was already snapping open his communicator.

"The ones out here?" Hendorf gestured around, "We only stunned half of them. The other half collapsed from exhaustion."

"What were those weapons they were firing at us?" Doctor Danar asked, rubbing the sore spot on her neck, "That laser thing burned like hell."

Sulu shook his head, "No idea. Never seen anything like it."

Uhura looked around, sized up the spread of Talosian forms. If Hendorf was right, then this was a scene of grim tragedy of a kind she had never experienced in all her years in Starfleet. Deep within her heart, she felt a powerful yearning for some factoid or some loophole that would let her conclude that Hendorf was wrong.

But Hendorf _wasn't_ wrong. Even the phaser fire in the tunnel had stopped and Uhura didn't need to see the look on Lieutenant Sulu's face to sense his feelings. "They stopped pursuing us, Lieutenant," she said, "They just can't do it anymore"

"Poor bastards don't even know how sick they are," Danar said, "We probably put them out of their misery."

"Right." Sulu tapped his communicator again, "Away team to Enterprise."

"Enterprise here," Lieutenant Scott answered.

"Six to beam up, and I'm marking a large piece of equipment for retrieval. One casualty, Doctor Elizabeth Danar. Also need retrieval if possible."

"Understood, Lieutenant. Standby."

Sulu felt the tingle in his spine as the transporter beam began to focus on him, felt that twinge of disorientation as a quantum barrier caused every part of his body to exist in two places at once. The swirling maelstrom of phased matter began to enclose around his senses...

 _Wait a minute. Didn't Elizabeth just...?_


	12. Chapter 12

**SURROUNDED**

Talos-IV, Standard Orbit

USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

Stardate 2261.42

\- 1530 hours -

There were certain surprises contained in the object that now sat on the central work table of the electronics lab. The choice of transistor materials, for one, and also the gallium-arsenide in the (he now believed, decorative) LED strips on the side of the device. The solid-state memory circuits within the cube were machined using a process he didn't recognize and probably couldn't duplicate, but their basic functioning wasn't overly complicated either.

In fact, Spock now saw, the device was remarkable simple for its _simplicity_. A half dozen blue-shirted science officers mingled with at least as many engineers and technicians around the electronics lab, crowded around ultrasonic sensor displays, spectrographs, lidar images and graphical displays that together were showing more and more detail of the cube-shaped object that was now enshrined in an isolation cell in the center of the room. This particular lab was usually used for engineering structural analysis, where Chief Engineer Scot and team would normally take a piece of failed equipment and electronically dissect it to determine exactly how and when it failed and then figure out how to either repair it or construct a replacement that wouldn't fail under the same circumstances. "And you're certain that this machine is the source of the Z-band signal?" Spock asked for the third time in an hour.

Lieutenant Scot craned his head around to sneak another look at the cube. "Once we figured out its power requirements and plugged it in, the thing immediately started broadcasting on the Z-band."

"Broadcasting _what_?" Spock asked.

"That part we don't know yet, but the computer thinks there's a sixty percent chance the signal is trying to connect to a discrete digital network. That seems to be its basic purpose: transmitter and receiver of digital information. Like a datanet router."

"Can you analyze the structure of the signal to determine how to control this device?"

"Given time, maybe," Scot turned back to the machine, wiping sweat off his forehead, "It'll take us another day or two to figure out the electronics of it."

"Your overriding priority, Mister Scott, is to determine a way to neutralize the Z-band signal, thereby limiting the effective range of Talosian mental influence. The Federation is on the brink of interstellar war, and time is of the essence."

Scot turned and stared at Spock for a moment, "We're sure the Z-band signal is related to their illusions?"

"Lieutenant Uhura is working to confirm that now, but it is the most likely scenario. A deeper understanding of the device's inner mechanism can be obtained after we have devised a countermeasure for the alien's power of delusion."

Scot nodded gamely, "Aye, that we can do. We've got some new data on the transmission coil that Uhura might be able to use."

"I will let her know when I return to the bridge."

Scot nodded again and turned back to the electronics lab, joining his fellow engineers at one of the lidar screens that was now displaying hyper-detailed maps of one of the cube's microprocessors."

Spock turned on his heels and exited into the main corridor just off the turbolift station. He started in the direction of the bridge...

And for a moment, little more than an instant, struggled to remember where he was going.

 _Yes. The bridge._

"Heading upstairs?" Doctor McCoy asked, coming up the corridor behind him, "Mind if I join you?"

"Please do," Spock said, and strode on towards the turbolift station at the end of the corridor. "Have you completed your examination of the Talosian specimens we recovered from the surface?"

"I did," McCoy nodded, "First of all, I need to point out that all of the creatures you recovered were males. That's a significant thing and it's not a coincidence. In terms of evolution, the male of the species isn't actually telepathic at all. They're evolved to be receivers of those signals, not senders."

Spock nodded, "Then the technology you encountered on the surface is most likely an artificial implement."

"Well, yeah, it allows males to project thoughts and emotions just like females do. Part of some kind of social equality movement that was supposed to make everything better. The problem is, males can't reliably tell the difference between fantasy and reality. They create illusions to trick others and then they fall for their own tricks."

Spock paused in front of the turbolift door, "And the females do not?"

"The females are egg-layers. Like queens in a beehive. In a natural environment, they control the males by transmitting images to them. They show them a picture of how things are _supposed_ to be, and then they take the images away. The males then work tirelessly to try make the world look like the picture."

"Very efficient."

"I know, right? But the females have more advanced mental functioning _and_ a higher capacity for abstract reasoning. They know there's a difference between what could be and what is. That's why females are meant to be leaders of society and males are meant to follow. Now, I'm not really sure where they got those amplifiers or how they work, but once the males gained that power, Talosian society collapsed like a house of cards. It's like if you went down to a planet and and doped the entire population with a hallucinogen that never wears off."

Spock hit a keypad on the wall and called for the turbolift car. Two seconds later the doors hissed open and he stepped inside and keyed the bridge. "Can you ascertain how long ago this process began?"

Doctor McCoy entered only after a long pause and leaned up against the wall. Spock noticed the Doctor's posture seemed slumped, stressed, as if he was on the verge of exhaustion. "It's been going on since before any of us were born," McCoy said, wheezing, "But that doesn't mean the situation is beyond hope."

Spock eyed him carefully noticing his physical distress. It seemed so extreme, so debilitating, and yet he somehow got the impression it wasn't a real cause for concern. "Are you feeling alright, Doctor?"

McCoy shrugged, "It's been a long couple of days."

"Yes..." Spock nodded and went on, "So the operative question is, can we find a way to neutralize the devices and return Talos Four to its natural state?"

"I was about to ask you that question. _Is_ there?"

"Mister Scott is working on a counter measure for the devices, but it is unlikely we will find a way to permanently disable them. The fact that the machines work in tandem with the alien nanites means that over the long term we may only be able to limit the range of their delusionary signals to within a few tens of meters."

McCoy stiffened, "Nanites?"

"The swarm you encountered on the surface. They apparently function as a medium for the Z-band transmissions, though exactly what role they serve we do not know."

"The amplifiers could have been Talosian technology. But where the hell did they get a swarm of nanites to boost the signal? They couldn't have developed that themselves. Where'd they get it from?"

Spock was about to answer when the turbolift doors hissed open and Lieutenant Sulu's voice called out to him from the Captain chair, "Commander! I was just about to page you. We've picked up a radiation surge on the long range sensors. Could be vessel coming out of warp."

"Have you established communications?" Spock asked. He knew that standard procedure on the approach of any unidentified vessel was to request identification and a statement of intentions. Sulu would have followed this to the letter unless Spock had specifically ordered radio silence.

Uhura answered smoothly, "No response to hails, no transponder signal. Whoever they are, they're running silent."

"Continuous hails, Lieutenant," Spock said, and went immediately to his science console and ran back the sensor logs for the past ten minutes. For most of that time there was nothing, just the cosmic background and the usual reflections from the planet's atmosphere and the nearby planets. Talos-IV had no moon of its own, which made the sky picture that much cleaner to boot... except for that brief moment, two minutes and fourteen seconds ago, when a flash of intense x-rays and ultraviolet radiation was spotted just over the planetary horizon. None of the ship's tracking sensors had been aligned properly to detect the actual flash, but they'd given enough of a direction and enough localization for Spock to guess that the flash had been an elongated phenomenon, like a bolt of lightning in a thunderhead.

To his lack of surprise, it didn't take more than a few seconds for the library computer to trace a hundred points of similarity with a standard STS-W4 electrogravitic warp drive. More than that, though, the computer found sixty seven additional points of similarity to three other sensor contacts already in the records. Sixteen of those came back to the Klingon cruiser Hurq'Wahan, which could be safely eliminated as the intruder's identity. Even though there was no trace of a transponder code to confirm, the computer now claimed fifty one points of similarity with the last recorded warp signature of _USS Vengeance_.

Dreadnought-class, then. A space superiority platform designed as part of Admiral Marcus' Project Phalanx, a ship whose design process was still a mystery and whose basic capabilities were even now shrouded in secrecy. What little Spock knew about the class was that it was massive - easily twice as large as a Constitution-class starship - and carried more firepower than an entire Starfleet task force. It was also impossibly fast, capable of briefly exceeding all accepted warp factors in order to rapidly overtake a fleeing spacecraft. Unlike most Starfleet vessels it was designed exclusively for combat, and most of its tremendous bulk was dedicated to the support of ground combat operations on a planetary surface.

There was no way to know if this was the same USS Victory whose field medical kit had found its way into the hands of the Trader. Spock thought it was unlikely, but then the Dreadnoughts' disappearance happened very soon after the crash of the Vengeance. Section Thirty One would no longer have regular Starfleet resources to draw from in dealing with the Talosians, so Talos Four would have been one of Victory's earliest stops after going AWOL...

Spock reigned in his thoughts, refocussing. It didn't matter much at this point why Victory was here or when it had been here last. It _was_ here, and clearly it was here for a reason. "Precautionary, Mister Sulu," Spock rose to his feet, turning away from his console, "Shields up."

"Aye, Sir. Raising shields. Maintaining yellow alert status..."

"Commence regular short range scans until further notice," as he spoke, he began to make his way across the bridge to the communications console, "Report any co-orbiting contacts immediately."

"Aye Sir," Chekov said, and lowered his head to concentrate on the sensor display on his console.

From next to the Captain's chair, Doctor McCoy grumbled, "Something I should know about?"

Spock didn't answer him. Moved to the transparent display panel at the auxiliary science station next to Uhura's communications console, and pulled up the latest results from the electronics lab's fileshare. A new set of diagrams and analysis was there, showing exploded details and a material breakdown of the signal-generating elements of the cube. As before, Spock noticed the design was remarkable for its simplicity: all of the basic elements of a subspace transmitter and receiver, minus any modern refinements or amenities, but machined to such a high degree of precision that almost exceeded Starfleet's capabilities. It was as if the finished product was far beneath the capabilities of the technology that created it...

Then he recognized it for what it was, and clarity swept through his mind, like an optical illusion suddenly coming into focus. "Fascinating. Lieutenant Uhura..."

"I've been listening to reflection from its warp drive," she said, "It sounds like a Dreadnought, but there's something weird about its engines."

Curious, Spock asked, "Define 'weird.'"

"There's a high-frequency transient in it. I can hear it pretty clearly. If it's the same engine design as the Vengeance, it's probably a mechanical flaw in their intercooler assembly. Like maybe one of the flux chillers doesn't open all the way."

"I will attempt to confirm that conclusion with our sensor data, Lieutenant," Spock said, trying not to sound too impressed. The library computer with all its heuristic algorithms and pattern-matching AI routines could find a needle in a moon-sized haystack, but Lieutenant Uhura could find that needle just by listening to the sound of cosmic rays bouncing off its tip, and could probably even tell you what kind of needle it was. "Remind me to consult you more often in questions like this," Spock said, "However, we have more immediate concerns."

"Right," anticipating his next question, Uhura went on, "I'm waiting for some test results, but I should have a solution in a minute or two. The fact that we are literally _surrounded_ by our enemies is making my job that much easier."

Spock stared at her for a moment, wondering at the meaning of her last statement. He noticed only now that Lieutenant Uhura, already pulling up the diagrams from the transmission coils on her own display, looked more tired than he had ever seen her look, even in the heaviest days of her academy coursework, even in the aftermath of the Black Ship incident when the entire crew had experienced a few too many near-death experiences. Spock noticed, for the first time since she returned to the ship, that her uniform tunic was still stained with dust and a few splatters of alien blood and the bruises on her forearms were beginning to swell. She'd refused medical attention when she returned to the Enterprise, and Spock had been too concerned with the device they'd brought back to press the issue. But now that the data was coming in, now that they seemed to have a moment of calm, his instinct for professionalism clashed briefly with his more personal needs and he struck a compromise.

He clasped his hands behind his back, stood semi-rigid and asked, "Are you alright, Lieutenant?"

"One of the females killed Doctor Danar," Uhura's eyes traced upwards and met his for two seconds as she answered, "My test results are related to that. I'm trying to analyze the behavior of the Talosian that killed her." And then flitted back to her console - and her work - without emotion or a break in her concentration. It was an almost _Vulcan_ response to that question.

Spock felt his blood starting to boil as Uhura suddenly seemed ten times more attractive than normal. "Is it not logical to assume the females were attempting to prevent the theft of the device as well?"

"That's what I thought at first, but I don't think so. I think they were trying to separate one of us from the away team so they could..." She trailed off as new window popped open on her display. A set of simulation results displaying complicated sinewave patterns, line and bar graphs, and a graphical summaries from multiple data runs. "Well _this_ is pretty simple," she said, sounding mildly - but barely - surprised, "So Scotty thinks that cube a subspace repeater keyed to psionic beta waves. The electronics are pretty basic, even though they're way too precise for this level of technology. Its function is simple too, in fact it resembles a Starfleet-issue authentication rig. If that's all there was to it, there wouldn't be a problem, but the main factor," Uhura wiped the palm of her hand across her forehead and then held it up in front of him, "is _this_ stuff _._ "

Spock looked at her hand. It was smeared with a dark, chalky substance that he initially took to be soot, but recent experience told him otherwise. "The nanoswarm."

Uhura nodded, still keeping her features flat and emotionless. And Spock suddenly got the impression that she actively suppressing her emotions to a degree he had never seen her attempt before. "We're not sure how they work yet," she went on. And still without conveying any emotion at all, Lieutenant Uhura reached down to her field jacket and placed her hand phaser on the console in front of Spock. The movement was so casual and so devoid of meaning that he almost didn't notice it at first. "This simulation isn't complete, though" she said, "I need a little more data on the Talosian Zeta wave from that female, and Doctor McCoy is in sickbay right now."

Spock squinted at her, glancing down at the hand phaser she had just casually placed on her console, and then back at her, "Lieutenant, Doctor McCoy is here on the bridge if you need to cons-"

"No he isn't." Uhura's eyes flitted up to his gain, emotionless and blank. And yet even there, hiding a sense of urgency that somehow underscored her words. "Doctor McCoy is in _sickbay_."

Spock stared at her for a moment, then glanced back at Doctor McCoy, still squatting down next to the command chair. Still, somehow, looking distressed, like a man who had just finished carrying a grand piano up three flights of stairs and was having trouble recovering. Any moment know it looked like he was going to have a coronary, and yet, he _still_ didn't seem to be a genuine cause for concern... "So he _is_." Spock picked up her phaser.

"Recording now," Uhura said, setting her console to monitor the Z-band signal. and then nodding at the phaser added, "It's set for stun."

"Thank you, Lieutenant." Spock picked up the phaser, casually turned around and shot Doctor McCoy in the head.

The _Talosian_ let out a high-pitched cry and as it crashed to its belly, but made no other movements as its consciousness faded. The huge steel shell it had been wearing on its back folded into its exoskeleton with such a violent crunching sound that Spock was certain the weight of the thing had just broken the Talosian's back; if it was healthy before it came aboard, it certainly wasn't _now_.

Everyone on the bridge except for Uhura and Sulu leapt to their feet on the edge of panic. Then they recovered, and a half dozen hand phasers were drawn and pointed at the Talosian from every corner of the room. Ensign Chekov was already paging a security team to the bridge while Spock calmly handed the phaser back to Lieutenant Uhura and examined the intruder himself. "One of the the Captain's abductors?" he asked.

Sulu shook his head, "This one's the female. You can tell by size. Probably the same one that killed Liz."

Spock nodded. "Matriarchal power structure is common in oviparous species. Females tend to be larger and stronger, but also more rare..." And he recalled the conversation with the ersatz Doctor McCoy in the turbolift. She'd been trying to explain to him _exactly_ that, and in her own roundabout way, she was asking him for help.

And yet, she hadn't seen fit to ask him _directly_. More and more evidence was beginning to fit a category in Spock's mind that deception and delusion were as fundamental to Talosian psychology as curiosity was to humans.

The turbolift hissed open. Lieutenant Janice Rand arrived with two security guards and the non-staggering, perfectly healthy Real McCoy close behind. He seemed even less surprised by their hitchhiker than Sulu and Uhura. "This gravity must be _killing_ her." he said, "I'll get her into isolation."

Spock nodded, then returned to the communications console next to Uhura, folded his hands behind his back and asked again, in the same tone of voice as before asked, "Are you alright, Lieutenant?"

Uhura stood up from her console, tilted up on her tiptoes, and kissed him on the cheek.

Once again, Spock felt his blood start to boil.

"Thank you for that. So, it seems like _this_ ," she turned back to her communications console, "Is the Z-band signal the female was broadcasting until just a moment ago. See how it flatlines right there?"

Spock looked at her screen and nodded, "The moment she lost consciousness."

"Right. That's a _natural_ Talosian brainwave. It's similar to the one the amplifiers are broadcasting. Basically, this means the cube is a synthetic analog to a telepathic female."

"A surrogate..." Spock raised a brow, "That female must have been part of a different group, separate from the Trader's people."

"My thoughts exactly. And this background signal here," she pointed to a second graph, underneath the first, "That's the signal from the nanites we recorded on the surface. It's almost the same pattern, but it's on a much shorter wavelength. Almost Delta band."

"So there are two separate kinds of signals," Spock nodded, "One from the males, one from the female. Is that significant?"

"Let's assume we're right, and the females only attacked Bo'Shan after Sulu disconnected the cube. They had a few males under their control too. A few, but not many. So probably the females are capable of projecting images but can't receive them."

Spock nodded, "So the nanites copy the thoughts of whatever organism they encounter and transmit those thoughts to the cube through the Z-band signal."

"Right, and that sorter wave signal is the near-delta wave. It basically copies the female's delusion signal. If we have this right, I work up a transmission protocol that will spoof the Z-band signal and let us control the amplifiers. But if we want to create our own illusions, we'll need an emulator of some kind. Some way of translating human thoughts into Talosian brainwaves. I'm sure how we could do that, though."

Spock said, "Could we repurpose the nanites?"

Uhura smiled, "Maybe. In fact, that's probably what the Talosians originally did. Without the nanites to relay their impulses, only the _females_ would be able to use the amplifiers."

Spock glanced back at Doctor McCoy, kneeling next to antigrav stretcher and the bulky Talosian body he and the three security men had just moved on top of it, "Fascinating..."

"It would take a while, though," Uhura added, "We've been analyzing these things since Doppelganger. We're still not sure how to control them reliably. And the Talosians have had _decades_ of practice. Any illusion we try and generate, they'll probably see right through it."

Doctor McCoy chimed in from the side of the prone intruder, "Why bother creating our own illusion? The shape these people are in? Just turn the illusions _off_."

Spock and Uhura both stared at McCoy, then back at each other as Uhura smiled, "That _would_ be a lot simpler," and she went to work on her console, beginning to input new variables into a simulation program, "If we generate a strong enough signal, flood the near-delta band with white noise..." and the results came back in seconds. Where before Spock had seen sinewaves and line graphs showing gentle curves and steady results, the new simulation showed chaotic patterns of random sawtooth lines superimposed over a barely-oscillating flatline, "Easy as pie. Those amplifiers would be useless. Only thing is, we'll need to be relatively close to the amplifiers for our jamming signal to take effect. Otherwise, the amplifiers will still be able to get a signal through."

"How close?"

"Hard to say. I'd guess not more than a few hundred meters."

Logically, Spock realized, that left only a handful of options. "Can you write a jamming routine for a shuttlecraft ECM pod?"

"Easily. But Spock, the colonists have been getting heavy weapons from somewhere, won't the Talosians send them to attack us again?"

"A problem for which a solution is long overdue." Spock straightened up, strode calmly back to the Captain's chair - sidestepping Doctor McCoy and the crippled Talosian on the stretcher, both on their way to the turbolift - and hit the intercom toggle before taking his seat. "Bridge to Chief Engineer."

"Scott here," came the inevitable answer, seconds later.

"Mister Scott, please prepare six Class-R shuttlecraft for evacuation mission. All four craft to be equipped with U.M.E.-Forty Eight electronic warfare pods."

"Aye... Four evac shuttles with yummy pods. Should they include a security team?"

"Four man deployment with instructions to follow shortly."

"Four men per shuttle. Aye, Sir. Would you like to supersize that for five additional credits?"

Spock raised a brow, "I beg your pardon?"

"Ach, never mind."


	13. Chapter 13

**WRONG THINKING**

Talos-IV, Planet Surface  
Talosian Menagerie  
Stardate Unknown  
Time Unknown

That familiar grinding sound caught Kirk's attention and the Captain woke slowly, keeping his mind blank and his emotions flat so the Talosians couldn't read him. Slowly, uncritically, he opened one eye and cataloged his surroundings, forcing himself not to make a judgement call on what he found there.

On first inspection, everything was where it should be. The transparency was still there, the stone walls and furniture were there. The girls were still there, sleeping in the cots the Talosians had given them two weeks ago. Kirk had ignored his cot and slept on a mat on the floor, realizing it would be easier to wake up slowly without being noticed, and a dozen times in the past month he'd used this trick to catch the Talosians sneaking things in and out of the cell through a false wall behind one of the stone panels.

Which brought him to his second inspection, looking at the false wall itself where deliveries seemed to appear without warning. The Talosians used their power of illusion to keep him from noticing when the door opened or closed, but they dispensed with the illusions when they thought they weren't necessary. At the moment, Kirk saw the false wall sliding slowly closed, the outline of a Talosian zoologist - he couldn't tell which one - retreating into the passageway. He had left something on the floor in front of that panel: three large beakers of some milky white liquid that the Talosians said was a nourishment drink but which Kirk had figured out also contained some kind of mild stimulant, probably an aphrodisiac. There was also a bundle of fabric on the floor that he assumed was fresh clothes for the three of them. These he eyed with a particular distaste; after the first week in this place their uniforms had become ragged and rancid from wear and tear and the replacements the Talosians had given them were uncomfortable at best.

And the black rock was still there. The black rock Kirk never touched, because it was clearly just a rock.

Kirk waited a few minutes longer, letting the Talosian scientist scuttle away to a safe distance before releasing the mental clench that kept his thoughts from flowing out of control. He sat up on his sleeping mat, crawled over towards the delivered clothes and unrolled them on the floor for his inspection. Same as before: those thin metallic minidresses for the women, knee-length pants for him. Never a shirt, never any underwear; it was little more than an accommodation of their lingering modesty. He guessed that these clothes were probably about as large as Talosian tailors (or machines?) knew how to make them, but on someone like Carol Marcus they couldn't help but look obnoxiously suggestive.

Or maybe that was the whole point? The garments were so uncomfortable that Doctor Marcus had simply washed and re-washed what was left of her uniform every time she bathed, although Vina didn't seem to mind and perhaps had even gotten used to them. Every time Marcus washed her uniform instead of surrendering it, the Talosians subjected her to an illusion of being eaten alive by regulan blood worms or drawn and quartered by Klingons; every time Kirk returned his too-small metallic pants without wearing them, the Talosians covered him with angry hornets, or fed him to a school of piranhas, or fed him the illusion of his enclosure filling up with boiling water until it finally drowned him.

Kirk picked up the milk bottle first. The Talosians could make it taste like just about anything, but for some reason it always hit his pallet like a broccoli and cheddar soup from the Enterprise cafeteria. To Carol Marcus it tasted like a chocolate malt from a corner shop in London, and to Vina it tasted like miso soup with plo'meek spices. It was the only thing he had eaten in this place in almost six weeks of captivity; he would have killed his own mother for a chicken sandwich.

He drank his "soup" without comment, then drank some water from the cistern in the corner of his cell while Marcus and Vina stirred awake and did the same, one at a time. Marcus waited until Vina had drunk from the cistern, then stepped into it and immersed herself up to her waist in the flowing waters, washing her clothes and herself at the same time. She'd been in the water all of fifteen seconds before she started screaming and thrashing, the pain of a thousand poisonous foot-long insects biting into her flesh and stripping her body to the bone. Even in this simulated hell she still managed to finish washing herself and her fabrics; it looked absolutely ridiculous, but it had stopped being funny at least four weeks ago.

Vina was being punished again for some minor thought crime, although this time she didn't scream. She simply closed her eyes, held herself and cried quietly but frantically for half an hour. Kirk, lastly, waited until Marcus was finished being punished, waited until she had climbed out of the cistern and dressed herself before following her lead and washing his own uniform in the water. As soon as he did, he became aware that the water was, in fact, molten steel, and that the heat of it had immediately stripped the flesh from his bones and lit his entire body on fire from head to toe. The pain was so intense that for a few moments it transcended pain itself and drove his mind to a state of borderline madness; screams mixed with laughter, curses, tears and gnashing of teeth until at last he thought he had done enough and pulled his arms and his uniform out of what suddenly became water again.

It had become a ritual for the three of them, and once it was concluded and all three were dressed they came together in a small circle in the center of the room, sat straight-legged with their feet in the center and focussed on their pinky toes. They sang childhood songs in their heads and practiced clearing their minds of any emotion at all, anything the Talosians could key on to stimulate their next set of illusions. Then Captain Kirk kicked his right foot, a signal for them to begin their routine. As planned, Vina tried to imagine a place while Doctor Marcus tried to imagine a person. Kirk himself filled his mind with images of bludgeoning the Talosians to death with various blunt instruments, thoughts so vicious and so primitive the Talosians would never begin to suspect the ongoing chess game the three of them were playing.

The first illusion began exactly as it always did. The cell, the hammocks and the cistern ceased to be real, as if they had never been there at all. They were sitting on a wooden pier over a lake somewhere, seagulls calling overhead, gliding in the warm summer air. Vina was now dressed in an overly-exotic two-piece bikini and Doctor Marcus was in a one-piece swimsuit that was at least two sizes too small. Captain Kirk found himself in a white bathrobe that he somehow knew had been a gift from one of the girls but he could not remember which one.

And when Doctor Marcus saw the robe, her face clenched into a mask of horror and disappointment in herself as she muttered, "Oh, bloody hell..."

"Problem, Doctor?" Kirk asked.

"My mind must have started wandering at the last minute. I'm sorry, Jim."

"Don't apologize. This is _their_ illusion, not ours. We can run with it."

Marcus looked at him again and her cheeks turned bright red with embarrassment. Or shame. Or both, now that Kirk tried to put a name to her expression.

"Actually," Vina said, "This is _my_ illusion. I think this is the boat scene from Vega's Pride."

Kirk stared at her blankly, and Marcus' face flashed in horror, "The holonovel?"

Vina nodded. Then puzzled as she asked, "What did _you_ think it was?"

"Never mind that... so then _he's_ supposed to be Vega?"

Kirk flinched, "I'm who?"

Marcus sighed awkwardly, "Vega's pride is an interactive about a Pashtun banker whose two wives are-"

"-it's not important what it's about," Vina cut her off. "It's a romance 'ractive I used to play it back on Earth. This scene is..." she cringes, "I always hated this scene. I usually kill program right before this part so I'm not really sure how it ends."

Marcus' face turned stony. "You mean this is going to be based on your _imagination_ of the scene."

"I suppose so. Why does it matter?"

"Oh god..."

"What?" Kirk looked at the two of them now, suddenly very worried, "Don't tell me we're all gonna drown or something."

"No, Captain... Uh..." Vina winced, "This part of the 'ractive gets kind of... _graphic_."

"How graphic?"

Vina answered, "This is a scene where a rival tribe shows up and calls in Vega's debts. They're going to gang-rape one of your wives, and you have to decide which one."

Kirk grinned, "Is that all? Simple enough. Choose neither."

"They'll kill us all if you don't. You _have_ to choose."

Before the Captain could offer his customary "so what?" Marcus jumped in, "No you don't. This whole situation is a trick by Vega. It's a test to see which of the two women will sacrifice herself to save him from having to make that choice. This 'ractive is played from the point of view of the wives. So, one of the wives offers herself in trade, and Vega watches the tribesman rip all her clothes off just to make sure she's serious about it. He intervenes at the last minute and says that she put her loyalty to him before her personal honor. If the player makes the sacrifice, he divorces the other wife and then there's this convoluted assassination subplot. If the player lets the other wife make the offer, Vega divorces _the player_ , and _she_ tries to murder the one he chooses. And _you_ ," Marcus shot a glance at Vina, "You _knew_ that already. You chose this scene on purpose, didn't you?"

Vina laughed at this, shaking her head while at the same time looking at the sky as if she expected something to drop out of the heavens to draw their attention away from her.

Kirk also shook his head, sighing, "Keeper made you an offer?"

"That last punishment of theirs was..." she shuddered, " _Creative_. Guess they found my weakness."

An electronic, croaking, atonal voice from absolutely nowhere broke into their conversation before it could develop further, "We have come to understand your reluctance stems from certain human taboos regarding mating and procreation. We have now removed those inhibitions as an obstacle. Two of you will mate willingly and one will mate forcibly."

Vina closed her eyes and shook her head, silently mouthing the words _Please no, please no..._

"That's a new low even for _you_ , Keeper," Kirk said to the disembodied voice in his head, "But what do I care? It's all an illusion anyway."

" _Your_ concern has ceased to be a factor, Captain Kirk. We have observed that there are few experiences your species dreads more than humiliation, and that the female named Vina is particularly sensitive to this form of stimulus. We have also observed that the male of your species has an innate tendency to protect the reproductive integrity of the fem-"

"I'm going to sit right here," Kirk interrupted, "And I'm going to do nothing. You can play any scenarios you like in the mean time, but I won't be a part of it." He folded his arms and locked his knees straight, sitting stiff as a pike on the pier.

"Me either," Marcus said, folding her arms and locking up the same way.

"You really _are_ some kind of masochist," Vina asked, looking at the two of them in bemusement. Kirk was slightly surprised by the break in her composure, and then a little disappointed. And then he hated himself for letting himself feel both of those emotions, knowing that now the Talosians could sense it too.

Vina had become the weak link in their chain. Or perhaps she had always been the weak link, just because the Talosians had had more time to work on her. And now they were going to...

His mind and his feelings had drifted. He forced those thoughts and reactions out of his mind, forced his emotions to a flat baseline. There was the plan, the interrogation, the means of escape. Nothing else mattered, no one else mattered...

"We _can_ compel your cooperation," The Keeper's voice warned him, "We could plant in your mind a sensation of intense sexual arousal that would diminish your capacity for rational thought or even proper moral functioning."

"But if it was just a _mating_ that you wanted, you would have done that by now. Or you could do it artificially with ordinary tissue samples..."

"At the risk of inflating your already enormous ego," Keeper cut him off, something like impatience in his translated voice, "I concede that exerting the long-term effort of directly manipulating your emotional states, both to install romantic infatuation with the female, genuine affection for your offspring, and the necessary diligence to ensure the proper care and development of both, would be an inefficient use of my time. It is proper that you, as sapient beings, should be conditioned to take responsibility for your own care and development under our careful guidance, not under our direct control."

"You'd rather train us to do it _for_ you than micro-manage our lives..." Kirk caught a flash of inspiration and realized how relevant that line of thought really was: _Train us to do your work for you. That's what this whole place is about, after all._

Marcus growled, "We're not animals, Keeper. You can't condition us like that if we know it's coming. The emotional response breeds resentment and anger. It'll have the opposite effect."

The pier and the beach disappeared, as did the racy swimsuits and the seagulls and summer sun. They were back in their cell, exactly where they had always been; they hadn't moved at all, in the illusion or in reality.

The Keeper was there, glaring at them from the other side of the transparency, his eyestalks flat against his head underneath his shell. He seemed visibly frustrated, rocking back and forth on his segmented legs as if he was preparing to pounce on something. Kirk could almost sympathize with the little crab-creature; he had so little control over his experiment and it was chipping away at his patience. "You have one last chance to breed one of the females."

Kirk closed his eyes and took a deep breath, "Starfleet officers know their duty. They'll die before they cooperate with terrorists."

" _I'm_ not a Starfleet officer." Vina folded her arms across her stomach, breathing shallow. Kirk sensed a certain resentment beginning to spill into her but didn't let his mind comment on it. Logically, he knew that Vina had been here too long and been through too much to have that much resistance to their influence. That was good; he seized on that thought and let himself feel sympathy for her.

"I sense that you are convinced of this yourself, Captain, but this opinion is no longer unanimous. Vina, for example, has been comfortable in captivity for many years, and has begun to yearn for the simplicity of submission before the disruption caused by your presence."

Vina muttered, squeezing her eyes closed, "You don't know me at all."

"While Doctor Marcus," The Keeper went on, "harbors romantic fantasies of which you have increasingly become subject. Her participation in your plan of passive resistance is based on selfish motives, namely, the desire to keep those fantasies hidden from you while at the same time attempting to win your approval. During the Vega's Pride illusion, she exhibited feelings of arousal and anticipation at the prospect that you might finally chose her as a viable mate."

Kirk ignored the Keeper's exposition for what it was: an attempt to trigger an emotional response he could use and manipulate, rather than the naked hatred Kirk had forced himself to direct at his captors whenever they were within earshot. He hated the Keeper for what he had done to the three of them, for what he had already done to Vina, and especially for what he was trying to do to Carol...

"And now you let yourself believe that you can protect the women from our influence by focussing on primitive emotions," The Keeper went on, "As Doctor Marcus has come to understand, this effort is ultimately futile. We have several times planted in her mind vivid sexual fantasies involving you, Captain, and Doctor Marcus has responded positively ninety eight point five percent of the time."

"That's not true!" Marcus sat bolt upright and glared at the Keeper.

"It is from these experiences that Doctor Marcus has concluded that a forced mating with you is vastly preferable to the pointless continuation of her punishment."

"That's not true at all!" Marcus leapt to her feet, "Stop lying!"

"She has permitted these illusions because she enjoys them," the Keeper went on as if he couldn't hear her, "And it has now become her preferred vector of reward. Her deepest wish, at this time, is that _you_ , Captain, would submit to our conditioning as fully as she and Vina have."

Kirk heard it, but didn't let himself believe it. _Carol's stronger than that._ "Sit down, Doctor," he said blandly, "Ignore him."

"He's lying, Captain! I've never had any kind of-"

"Doctor Marcus," Kirk said with more urgency, "Sit down." _Where are you going with this, Carol? I can't play along if I don't know the script..._

"Don't you believe me?" Marcus sounded as if she was pleading with him.

"Yes, I believe you."

"You..." she stared at him, then at the Keeper, then at the Captain again. "You do?"

"I sense that you do not believe Doctor Marcus' denial," The Keeper said, matter of factly, "Your earlier supposition was incorrect, Captain. _Carol Marcus_ is the weak link of your party."

Kirk flinched at that reference, and then hated himself for letting it happen. The Keeper had either guessed this, or he was better at reading them than Kirk suspected. But then, this too was a good sign; they were back on script after all.

"Jim..." he heard a break in her voice and opened his eyes for the first time. Doctor Marcus was standing in her part of the broken circle, tears streaming down her cheeks. "Jim, won't you...?"

"Carol," Kirk looked up and tried to keep his expression neutral, "He's manipulating you. He's manipulating all of us. The only way they can win is if you let them. Now please, _sit down._ "

"No."

"Carol..."

" _No_!" fast as a reflex, Marcus reached down and picked up the black rock from the floor, turning it in her hands. She seemed nervous and confused, like she wasn't sure what to do with an ordinary black rock that just happened to be on the floor for no reason. She looked up at Kirk pleadingly, "You would really rather die than be with me, Jim? Is it really that important?"

"It's not about that. If we give in to them, even a _little_ -"

"What do you mean _if_?" Vina laughed, "We eat the food, we drink the water. We let them change the taste of those drinks. We give in _alot_ , Jim."

"But you draw the line when it comes to _me_! Of all the women in all the world you fool around with, the one person you reject is _me_! Why?"

Kirk growled, "Carol, you're doing exactly what they want!"

"Maybe it isn't about what _they_ want anymore?! What about what _I_ want?!"

"What _do_ you want Doctor?"

"Goddammit, Jim! I want to go _home_! Back to the Enterprise! Back to Earth! I want to get out of this place, away from these goddamn crab things and their mind games! I want to be anywhere else but here!"

"Carol..."

"He doesn't _want_ you, Carol," Vina hissed, "He's already made his choice. You're weak and selfish and he sees it now."

Kirk considered this for a moment. It didn't seem quite right, maybe a little too obvious, but subtlety might not be called for at this point. "Vina's been here for years and hasn't broken yet. You, I see on the edge of nervous breakdown after just two weeks... what else can I say?"

"You can say that you love me! You can say that you want to get out of here so we can go back to the ship and be together again! You can say that you _care_!"

"Carol," He began slowly, "It's not like that at all. I'm your superior officer and you're a subordinate. I'm sorry if you misunderstood. But you and I don't have that kind of connection together..." he managed a significant glance at Vina and in his mind imbued it with the implication, _Not like the two of us have,_ "And frankly I doubt that we ever will."

Somehow, in a whisper of perception, Kirk got the distinct impression that Doctor Marcus' hair was on fire and that laser beams were about to shoot from her eyeballs. It was an echo of an emotion so powerful that the Talosians couldn't help but pass it along; it was so strong it was probably overwhelming even to them.

Kirk's eyes widened in horror as he realized, _Carol's not faking this!_

"You son of a bitch!" Marcus glared at him, flames of hatred burning in her eyes, "How dare you! How _dare_ you!"

The Keeper took a small step back from where he'd been quietly watching the scene, seemingly thoughtful. "Interesting..."

"Carol," Kirk said, trying to calm her, "Think about what you're doing..."

Marcus seemed to realize something, and she looked down at the black rock in her hands. The black rock that _was_ , in fact, an old Kessler and Reed hand phaser from Columbia's arsenal. The hand phaser that was now clenched in Carol Marcus' sweating, shaking fist. She turned the knob to release the safety and pointed it directly at Vina with the look of murderous rage boiling from every pore.

Kirk and Vina were on their feet in an instant. Vina had both hands up in a calming if futile gesture. "Carol, _don't_!"

"You bastard!" Marcus said, "I should have known! James T. Kirk, grand womanizer of the galaxy! And I thought the damn _Talosians_ were manipulative!"

Kirk swept Vina behind him, moving away from the cot, putting his back to the transparency so that any phaser blast wouldn't splash debris back at them if it missed. He shook his head slowly, "Carol, this isn't going to help. Think about what you're doing..."

"It's _that woman_ , isn't it?" Her voice broke and fresh tears flowed down her cheeks, "Isn't it, Jim? You want her that badly?! Is she so bloody perfect?! She's not even _human_ , Jim! She's some kind of alien monster manipulating your thoughts!"

The Keeper's voice registered again, like a distant breeze through a forest, "Captain Kirk has made his choice, Doctor. Eliminating the female will not change that."

"You _sure_ about that?" Marcus turned all of her attention on Vina and dialed the phaser up to its maximum setting, "What do you think, Jim? Crab legs for dinner?"

"Stop it, Carol!" Kirk shouted, and turning to the Keeper said it again, "Fine, Goddammit, I'll choose! Just stop this!"

"Too late, Jim." Doctor Marcus raised her arm and aimed down the site, pointing her phaser directly at Vina. And she pulled the trigger.

The phaser pulse flashed with a horrifying brilliance, like a flaregun in a dark room. Kirk instantly recognized a phaser pulse at its highest disruption setting, enough power to reduce a human body to a cloud of ash with a single shot. But it took him just a bit longer to realize that the beam hadn't hit _Vina_ at all, but had actually missed her by a handful of inches and hit the wall behind her, just inside of the transparency that enclosed them. The metal frame around the transparency flared, melted, crackled and then collapsed; the transparent aluminum barrier came crashing down, and in that instant there was nothing at all between the three of them and the utterly-startled Keeper.

The phaser fired a second time, this time a blue-white stun bolt through the thickest part of the Keeper's head. The blast knocked the little alien completely off his feet and sent him tumbling backwards, legs over shell, as if he'd been hit by a giant golf club. Marcus rushed to the edge of the destroyed transparency and looked in both directions down the corridor; she saw there two Talosians next to an adjacent cage, both looking startled and terrified at...

She saw there two _human children_ next to an adjacent cage, both looking started and terrified at...

She saw there two human children next to an _ice cream shop_ , both looking _happy to see her as if_...

"There's two..." she said, her voice almost dreamy. This was the limit of the information she could relay; her brain was still trying to decide just what it was seeing two _of_.

Kirk vaulted over the edge of the frame, snatching the phaser from her hand. He fired without slowing down or checking his targets, stun bolts through the center of mass. Both of the Talosians crumbled into a tangle of legs and the illusion they were generating faded from Marcus' mind just as quickly.

"How did you do that?!" Vina asked, breathless. She was edging over the top of the ruined enclosure now, climbing down after them, "You broke his conditioning! You must have-"

Kirk turned the phaser in one motion and shot Vina in the chest. She stiffened and doubled over as if she'd just been punched and then spun to the ground, already unconscious.

Marcus looked at him in surprise, "What did you do _that_ for?"

"Because you might be right. She might not be what she appears to be."

Looking down at Vina and the fact that she was clearly not a Talosian, Marcus shook her head sadly, "Looks normal enough _now_."

"Wasn't talking about her species."

Marcus nodded, taking the hint. "So what do we do now? What's the plan?"

Kirk reached down and scooped Vina up from the floor, hoisting her over his shoulders in a fireman's carry. "First thing, we get to the surface," he said, handing the phaser to Marcus with his free hand, " _If_ they let us get that far."


	14. Chapter 14

**PERSPECTIVE**

Talos-IV, Standard Orbit  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.42

\- 2250 hours -

Back in San Francisco right about now, family restaurants were closing down for the night and the dance clubs were getting ready to receive their first visitors. The party was getting into full swing in the pubs, bars, dives and lounges around the wharf and college students were looking at their watches or phones or eyelid implants to see if they had enough time for another round of drinks before heading back home to study. A few years ago at this time of night, Cadet Nyota Uhura would have been sitting at the desk in her dorm room, re-writing her lecture notes for the third time, or solving coordinate substitution problems by hand, or speed-testing herself in three-one-three translation drills. Now _Lieutenant_ Uhura was sitting at a desk in her quarters on C-deck staring at a computer screen that was filled with PCAP programming code and two tablets next to her with her system configuration notes scrolling a never-ending loop.

Computer programming wasn't Uhura's speciality, but this was a simple program to write. She'd studied Starfleet's A5 and the more powerful (and also monumentally more difficult) A7 programming languages in the Academy, and she was one of the very few operations officers on the ship with a certification in PCAP programming. That same programming language formed the "guts" of everything else the ship and its shuttlecraft knew how to do, including the UME-48 electronic warfare pods that were now being fitted to shuttlecraft for the final rescue attempt. She'd taken on the task of writing the jamming program herself because she understood the dynamics of the subspace radio signal it was intended to neutralize and she knew exactly what to tell the computers to get the desired results. It was, if anything, just a matter of plugging in the right variables in the right places.

Or so she had _assumed_ when she started this task a little over seven hours ago. Then she'd discovered that the control software for the UME-48 didn't have the right configurations she needed to vary the jamming signal and neither did any of the other hardware that could be ported onto a shuttlecraft. She had almost had to completely re-write the control software for the pods, which would have been complicated enough had she not also had to rewrite the control interface that allowed the pods to be controlled by the operators on the shuttlecraft. And this, in turn, lead her to the realization that the operators on the shuttle would have to be able to use the pods without having any real experience in subspace field modulation, which meant the program she was writing would have to be self-regulating and be able to adjust itself on the fly. That meant more variables, more new functions, more subroutines. _More work._

Uhura leaned back in her chair, rubbing her tired eyes. She'd dimmed the all the lights in the room except for those directly above her desk and the sound system gone through her entire "study hard" playlist - all four hundred and eighty seven songs - for at least the third time now. She was so close, and yet she was getting _nowhere_. She'd missed the dinner call altogether and her body was demanding to be fed but her mind countermanded the order lest her train of thought be interrupted by the act of standing up and walking somewhere.

"Alright," she said, taking a deep breath, thinking out loud again, "Data type is variable string. Sigma three lambda one five seven. Cosine sigma three lambda over two root one five..." she sat up in her chair and looked at the notes on one of the PADDs on her desk. "Three lambda over two root... one point one five..." the words and numbers were blurring together. She rubbed her eyes and tried to focus again, "Three lambda over over two root five point... one point..." She set the PADD down, rubbed her eyes, stretched, twisted, and found that no matter what she did or how she moved her body wanted to be somewhere else. "Just get it done," she told herself, almost angrily, "Jim and Carol and everyone else needs this. Get it done..."

She took a deep breath, slapped her cheeks to get the blood flowing and started again. "Data type is variable string," she said, setting the parameters in the program, "Input is sigma three lambda one five seven. Cosine..." she took a deep breath and blinked at the screen, making sure she had the right numbers, speaking slowly as she typed, "Sigma... three.. lambda... over two one five root-"

Her door buzzer chimed once.

"Two one five root five one four seven... five point one _four seven_. Got you, you bastard! Five point one _four seven_ over pi alpha three to... no... times pi alpha three to the nth power..."

Her door buzzer chimed again.

"Please god, don't let me kill this person." She stood up slowly, tried to smooth down her uniform tunic and tried to think of the most polite thing she could say to the brainless son of a bitch that was risking life and limb to interrupt her work at a time like this. When she was sufficiently satisfied with her chosen response, she pressed the release and the door slid open.

Commander Spock somehow resembled a main battle tank by the way he filled her doorway with his presence, and his weapon of choice - a large aluminum tray stacked with sealed plastic containers from the officer's mess - seemed somehow just as menacing as a tank's railgun would have been. And just like a tank, she knew she was powerless to do anything about it; Spock's armor would deflect her worst insults as easily as her most heartfelt pleading. If he was here, he was here for a reason, and it was best to surrender while she still could. "Hello, Commander," she said, abandoning her verbal weapons for the futile gesture they were.

"Lieutenant." Spock nodded, and stepped into her quarters without waiting for an invitation. As the doors slid closed behind him he placed the tray on the end table next to her bed and announced, "Doctor McCoy has informed me that you were absent at your scheduled meal times earlier this evening, likely an oversight due to the programming task you have taken on."

Uhura nodded, "I meant to get something, but I just couldn't get away. This algorithm is kicking my ass." _And your interruptions aren't helping,_ she almost said, but held her tongue for the moment.

"Do you require assistance?"

Uhura shrugged, "I think I can handle it. It's simple work, it's just time consuming."

"I interpret that as an answer in the affirmative."

"No, really. I got this, I just need-"

"PCAP programming languages are deceptively simple in order to aid in memorization of common subroutines. They tend to become unnecessarily time-consuming if the programmer is not able to make efficient use of a subroutine reference library."

She stared at him for a moment, considering this. She didn't completely understand what he was talking about, but after a moment she realized that that was the _point_. "So you're saying I'm doing this the hard way."

"There are certain..." he struggled for a term, "Tricks that can make this process easier. Shortcuts, you would call them. PCAP lends itself extremely well to such methods."

"Then your interpretation is correct, Commander. I _could_ use some help with this."

Spock's response was to unstack the first food containers and flip them open with his thumb. One container revealed a large pale lump of pre-rolled ugali on a bed of kale, the other contained thin-sliced beef with gravy and a vegetable broth. A second set of containers contained plomeek soup with tofu and a bowl of steamed broccoli with Andorian peppers.

Uhura's stomach suddenly performed an improbable series of aerobatic maneuvers in her abdomen in anticipation of finally being fed.

"Spock," she said, pulling a chair up to the table, "Have I told you today that I love you?"

"I do not believe you have made mention of it within the last twenty four hours, no."

"Ah. Well. I love you, and you're awesome."

The softest whisper of a smile crossed his lips as he answered, "It is only logical that I should attempt to look after your nutritional as well as psychological needs in order to maintain my senior communications officer at peak efficiency."

"I have _other_ needs beyond that, you know," Uhura said, taking up the ugali and feeling the texture. The food fabricators had never been great at imitating Kenyan food, but this was a better effort than usual. "Certain... maintenance requirements? Stress release?"

"Are you feeling _stressed_?" Spock dipped his spoon into his plomeek soup and just enjoyed the aroma for a moment.

"Extremely."

"Then I shall have to find some means of relieving your tension. Logically and efficiently, of course."

"Of course!" Uhura smiled, dipped the ugali in the vegetable broth and took a first, tentative bite. Then another. Then a third. Then she stopped herself from eating too much at once and quietly scolded herself for letting it go on so long. _God, I'm turning into Kirk..._

"Audio," Spock said, speaking to the air, "Moon of Mombassa."

Before Uhura could ask why, the piano and saxophone melody started its intro and she was lulled into silence by the sound of her favorite New Mombassa Blues riff. It also happened to be one of Spock's favorites, not that he would ever openly admit to having a favorite piece of music to anyone but her. The entire track was almost twenty minutes long and had been recorded live on a holodeck just off the Mombassa Uplift Preserve, two blocks away from where Uhura grew up. It was, if anything, the soundtrack of her childhood, as fundamental to her as the sound of her own breathing.

She sat back in her chair and laughed, "You thought I was homesick."

"Lieutenant?"

"You show up in my quarters with ugali and yanki kebabs and play Moon of Mombassa. Seems like you're trying to give me a taste of home."

Spock shook his head, "We are on a mission in deep space, far from civilization, facing a crisis extremely alien in nature. I assumed it would be comforting to provide you with something familiar, so as to aid your psychological adaptation to novelty."

"There's nothing so alien about the Talosians," Uhura said, dipping her ugali again, "In fact, I'm thinking they're a lot like humans used to be a long time ago."

"You think so?"

"Back in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Europeans and Americans enslaved Africans by the millions. They told themselves a comforting narrative about the racial superiority of the caucusoid genotype."

Spock nodded, "I am familiar with the history, yes. You believe there is a comparison?"

"People will tell themselves all kinds of things to justify something that can't be justified. Most of the time, it's people just looking for an excuse."

"An interesting perspective."

She read the subtext in his voice. "You disagree?"

"To a point. I agree that their behavior has parallels to human and even to Vulcan history. But the reason for it seems to be more of a defense mechanism. When faced with an intractable problem seemingly beyond your control, it is often easier to immerse yourself in a fantasy than face reality."

Uhura frowned, "We're talking about the same thing."

"You believe so?"

"Americans enslaved Africans because it was convenient. Economically, anyway. And socially too. It gave them a source of cheap labor and a stable power structure in an unstable time."

"True..."

"But the reality was right below the surface. Their convenience came at the cost of suffering on a massive scale. So they told themselves that their slaves weren't really suffering, that they were better off, in fact they deserved to be this way because they were so inferior."

"Mm..." Spock considered this, quietly sipping his plomeek soup as his mind went to work. A psychohistorian or a sociologist would have an easier time processing the question, but for him it was an interesting logical problem to say the least.

But Uhura wasn't finished yet. "We haven't really changed, have we?"

Spock glanced up, "In what way?"

"That ship that's started shadowing us. USS Victory, is it?"

"Ah..." he nodded, spooning his soup. "You believe this is a Section Thirty One operation."

"Who else _could_ it be? We found that medkid on the surface. We know they've been here before. And we saw what they were doing to those people on Beta Three."

"The Landru Experiment has not been proven to be a Section Thirty One operation."

"But you strongly suspect it was."

Spock nodded slowly, "I see it as a strong possibility."

"Splitting hairs again?"

"The difference between truth and falsehood is _often_ hair-thin, Nyota. And it is not my intention to be argumentative..."

"I know, I know. Sorry. But in this case, looking at the circumstances..."

"Yes," Spock nodded, setting his soup spoon down on the tray, "Perhaps the Talosians are part of this as well?"

Uhura squinted at him, "Of course they are. They're the ones who-"

"Your comparison, I mean. That there is a distinct group of individuals within the Federation who share a common ideology. The propensity to deceive themselves, to create a view of the universe that justifies the unjustifiable in the name of a common good. Perhaps they are motivated by fear, or by the sense that the problems they face are unsurmountable and that extreme action must be taken to rectify the situation."

"Now you're talking about Admiral Marcus and his Dreadnought."

"Indirectly, yes."

"So you agree. This has Section Thirty One written all over it."

Spock frowned and repeated, "I see it as a strong possibility."

Uhura buried the urge to interpret this as mere fence-sitting by an overly pedantic thinker. Spock was thorough and he strove for accuracy, but he was also decisive and swift in the applications of his judgement. If he held out skepticism it was because he was judging all factors objectively, not leaping to conclusions, and being careful not to be mislead by his emotions or his prejudices. When he chose to strike, he would be absolutely sure he had the right target, because his attack would be precise, measured, and utterly devastating.

There was a certain artfulness to Spock's problem-solving patterns that Uhura had come to appreciate over their years together. Someone like Kirk could whip up some kind of insane, over-the-top stunt and still manage to pull it off just because his enemies would never think anyone was crazy enough to try it. But Spock was simply brilliant; if a right answer existed, he would find it eventually.

What needled him, Uhura finally realized, was that there was no right answer in this situation. Her tone softened as she said, "What if our categories are wrong?"

"Explain," Spock said, spooning more of his soup.

"People in the Federation like to think of ourselves as the good guys and the Klingons and the Romulans and whoever else as being the bad guys. But what if it's not like that at all? What if there's a certain type of person in the Klingon Empire, and a certain type of person in the Romulan Empire, and that this specific type of person is the cause of all of our problems?"

"I am not sure I follow you..."

"Maybe this certain type of person is the same kind of person who does things like hire a bunch of psychotic telepaths to play around with people's memories? I mean, we've been thinking all this time that this is all part of a plot by Starfleet officers to create some kind of secret weapon against enemy governments..."

"Is _that_ what we're thinking?" Spock raised a brow, " _I_ assumed the target of this program would be unsympathetic elements within the Federation government."

Uhura's eyes went wide at this, "Seriously?"

"As a means of covering their tracks," Spock went on, "Placing pliable agents within the Federation's bureaucracy would be a most efficient step. An organization like Section Thirty One cannot operate through normal channels, nor can it leave a proverbial paper-trail of its dealings. Communications and the allocation of resources must be handled anonymously, and who better to entrust those duties to than someone who is programmed not to remember having done it?"

"Oh my god..."

"You assumed the Talosians' services would be targeted only towards _foreign_ governments?" Spock nodded, "I do admire your optimism."

Uhura shuddered. "So then you agree with me again. Whoever's behind this whole plan, they're probably the same kind of people who run the Klingon and Romulan Empires. The same back-stabbing 'whatever means necessary' types. I don't know if there's a word for that kind of person-"

"Imperialists," Spock said, "Jingoists. Dominionists. The Hegemonists of Vulcan and the Royalists of Andor. Now that I think about it, I wonder if they are more cooperative with one another than with unsympathetic elements of their own societies. Imperialists can at least compromise on a solution that allows each of them to expand their respective empires. A domestic pacifist is always a greater threat to that aim than a foreign imperialist."

"And _that's_ why you think Section Thirty One is more likely to attack Federation citizens than Klingons?"

"That and the one hundred and twenty eight casualties the Enterprise sustained in the only recorded combat action of a Dreadnought class starship. Its sister ship has now entered orbit with us, and I don't expect _their_ actions to be much more praiseworthy."

"What are we gonna do if it comes to that?"

Spock considered the question carefully, "USS Vengeance was not even fully armed when it attacked us, and it managed to cripple the Enterprise within forty five seconds. Any attempt to engage the Victory would be an exercise in futility."

"I completely agree. But that doesn't answer my question, does it?"

Spock raised a brow, "We will... think of something."

"I hope so..." Uhura dipped the last of her ugali in the broth, wrapped it in a kale leaf and finished it in two over-large bites. She could feel the blood flow resuming through the top of her brain and a clarity of thought that had alluded her for hours. If it wasn't the familiarity of the food that did it for her, the little boost to her metabolism was a welcome bonus.

And Moon of Mombassa was less than halfway through, transitioning into that haunting saxophone solo that had always made Uhura stop whatever she was doing and probe through the audible nuances of the sound. All of her recordings were ultra-high fidelity, high enough that she'd once had her computer run a photicsonar analysis from the sound pattern to figure out what the saxophonist actually looked like. But even so, it was the _sound_ of the piece that always sent ripples up and down her spine. Haunting, soothing, playful and _alive_. The night life of Kenya in musical form.

"Such a wasted opportunity," Spock suddenly blurted out.

Uhura sat up a little, staring at him, silently asking for an explanation.

"Kronos," Spock said, "The war."

"Do you mean the Romulan invasion? I did hear something about that earlier... We knew there'd been some skirmishes, but now they're going for the throat?"

"It would appear so. According to Admiral Barnett, they have launched a full-scale invasion of the Klingon homeworld. Their tactics probably resemble their attack on Sol during the Second Romulan War. The Romulans call it 'Tal'Shia,' which in old Vulcan means 'the breaking of the neck.' In theory, it is the practice of settling all disputes, no matter how minor, by cleanly assassinating the opposing party."

Uhura blanched. "So you and your next door neighbor are arguing over a parking spot..."

"A practitioner of Tal'Shia would sneak up behind his neighbor, snap his neck, and claim the parking spot for himself."

"That seems kind of excessive."

"On ancient Vulcan, the Tal'Shiar believed in victory at any cost. _Nothing_ was excessive as long as it accomplished their goals. In this case, the annihilation of an entire species may be an acceptable means of laying claim to a handful of disputed planets."

Uhura sighed, "You'd think the Klingons would be too tough for that. Last I heard, their fleet was more than a match for ours..."

"It is, and it _isn't_. The Empire has been in economic decline for generations. Their most powerful ships are centuries old, and their newer vessels are designed to be constructed cheaply and in large numbers. The Romulans were already beginning to challenge Klingon positions in the wake of the Narada incident, and the demolition of Praxis may have been interpreted as a sign of weakness."

"I keep thinking about Nero and what happened to Vulcan..." Uhura sat back in her chair, folding her arms, "You think they'll go after Earth next?"

"It's clear the Romulans intend to seize the resources of the Klingon Empire to fuel further conquests," Spock said, "Though to what end, who knows? Under different circumstances, the Romulans might have actually _allied_ with the Klingons in order to undermine the Federation."

Sitting up suddenly Uhura asked, "Who are _you_ rooting for?"

Spock froze, momentarily caught off guard by the question. He hadn't at all considered that one side or the other might be a preferable victor, but now he was reminded of the unfortunate implications of either. A Romulan victory would mean a third Romulan War, this time involving the whole of the Federation and on an even larger scale than their previous battles, which at the time were already unprecedented and had never been rivaled since. But a Klingon victory wasn't much better; if the Empire survived it would find itself wounded and desperate and starved of its already scarce resources, with no choice but to expand or die trying. The Romulans were probably the stronger enemy, the Klingons the more unpredictable. If he had to choose, he would choose neither, but that wasn't really an option.

Then his eyes caught Uhura's, and his train of thought jumped tracks. She wasn't really asking him which of them he preferred to win, she was asking him if he had been paying attention to _their_ conversation. It was a trick question, meant to test his concentration. And so he answered smoothly, "For those who want to live in peace. _Whatever_ side they happen to be on."

Uhura almost smiled, "I love that answer."

"I wonder if such people even exist in the Klingon Empire?" Spock asked, "Our past experiences would seem to suggest otherwise."

She smiled broader, "A military patrol in an abandoned city and a cranky general on a search-and-destroy mission. Not much of a sample size."

"True," Spock nodded appreciatively, "And certainly our experiences with Section Thirty One have not been significantly better. Overall, I blame a general lack of communication between the rival parties. It would be far more logical if we could establish some common ground that would allow all of us to peacefully pursue our mutual goals."

"Well then, I guess it's a good thing you have the best communications officer in Starfleet."

Spock raised a brow, "Really? And who might that be?"

She laughed, slapped him on the chest, "You ass!"

"And now a reference to my ears. You are in a cryptic mood tonight..."

She hit him again, and then leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

"Now then," Spock, closed the lid on his soup container, rose from his chair and started to Uhura's terminal, "Let's examine your PCAP problem. With your permission, of course."

"Of course!" Uhura said, "The sooner we get this done, the sooner you can help your communications officer with some much-needed stress relief."

"I find your logical inescapable, Lieutenant."

Uhura chuckled and then leaned over the terminal next to him as he sat in her chair. "This is where I left off."

Spock read it aloud, "Sigma three lambda over two one five root five point one four seven over pi alpha multiplied by pi alpha three to the nth power..." his eyebrow rose, "Got you, you bastard..."

"Shit, did I actually _type_ that?"

"I understand your frustration, Lieutenant. You are attempting to reconstruct the Sato-Hayse series from scratch. I have no doubt that you are fully capable of doing so independently in less than a tenth of the time required for Captain Sato and Commander Hayase."

"How did it take _them_?"

"Four weeks, although at the time USS Icarus was trapped within the event horizon of a black hole so the calculations were actually concluded within seventy two hours of real time. Even so-"

"Let me guess. PCAP has a built-in function for the Sato-Hayse series?"

Spock nodded, "It does. The callback is by name, with or without the hyphen, and takes seven parameters alphabetically. Simply define the alpha, delta and lambda factors, the first and second derivatives, any applicable phase shift, and the exponents for sigma notation."

"In that order?" She reached down and typed the callback herself.

"In that order," Spock echoed, "I believe this will solve most of your problems."

"Only if you can help me with the callback for the Balmer Series," she said, finishing the line as described. And he was right, it was a lot simpler than trying to reinvent the equations from scratch.

Spock checked her work, nodded with approval and said, "The Balmer Series is more complicated, but elegant in execution. I would be happy to walk you through it if-"

The PCAP code vanished from her screen. A flashing Red Alert icon filled it instead and klaxons started waiting on the intercom beneath the stressed voice of Ensign Tyler on the bridge. "Red alert! All sections, red alert! Commander Spock to the bridge!"

Spock was on his feet in an instant, and Lieutenant Uhura was right behind him. Both rushed out of her quarters and into the open atrium that combined all the senior officer's quarters into a broader communal space, like the residence halls at Starfleet Academy writ large. Lieutenant Sulu and Lieutenant Gaila were already scrambling into an almost-full turbolift at the far end of the room; Sulu held out a hand to hold the doors open as the two of them rushed into it.

Spock felt something sharp and solid brush against his leg and looked down on reflex. Someone he hadn't noticed before was standing in the crowded lift with her knee pinned against the back of his thigh. The knee was wrapped in the thin, curved, ergonomic enclosure of a power-assist frame, that enclosed both legs and the lower back of one Lieutenant Janice Rand, fresh out of physical therapy. A power-assist frame was in theory an adaptive medical device to restore functionality to someone who had lost it due to injury or disease. In practice, power frames sometimes augmented its users abilities significantly above their original baseline, which might have explained why Lieutenant Rand was reluctant to take hers off.

Sometimes, Spock observed, a useful tool required a useful excuse to use it. For humans it was a matter of pride or dignity; he wasn't sure, anymore, what the Vulcan reason was.

The turbolfit doors hissed open and ten senior officers spilled onto the bridge, rushing to their duty stations. Spock took the Captain's chair in the center of the room and called for a report from the standby navigator as Ensign Chekov took his place. "Report, Ensign."

Ensign Tyler answered, "We have sensor contact, Commander," Tyler said, smoothly vacating the seat as Chekov slid into it, "Unknown vessel at extreme range. Signature matches the profile of the ship that warped into orbit yesterday. Profile suggests Dreadnought class."

Spock rushed over to the science console and replayed the logs from the library computer. There it was, as Chekov announced. A radar ping on the active scan with a reflection consistent with a Dreadnaught-class starship, even the deceptively small radar and thermal cross section that Spock had observed on the Vengeance. And then the reflection grew smaller, suddenly fading in intensity, and over the course of five seconds vanished from view.

No, not _totally_ vanished. The short-range sensors were still picking up a radiation anomaly from that region, a high-output reading in the near ultraviolet band. Spock had seen this effect once before. "He's using a cloaking device," he said, straightening up, "I see. He remained visible just long enough to obtain a firing solution."

Chekov half turned his chair, "Then the next time he decloaks, it'll be just before he opens fire."

"He may not need to decloak _at all_. The Dreadnought's main weapons array can be deployed independently. He can attack us without ever presenting a visible target."

"Why bother using stealth?" Chekov turned all the way, "They outgun us ten to one. They could just walk right up and slaughter us."

Spock was already lost in thought, pondering this. Their solutions, at this point were limited, and he simply didn't have enough time to explore them all. Chief among their problems was the fact that the colonists had undoubtedly beefed up their defenses in recent days and a second attempt to rescue the Captain would be extremely difficult, even if they could get close enough to counteract Talosian influence, even if Uhura's new jamming program was finished and properly tested. There was simply no efficient way of dealing with their resistance, especially not in the limited time they now had left.

No matter how he tried to analyze the problem, the only logical solution was to retreat and adopt a new strategy of limiting further losses in pursuit of what was clearly a lost cause. And in any other place and any other time, he would have been perfectly happy to accept that logic had again provided the best possible answer. But this was the USS Enterprise, a ship crewed by miracle workers and captained by a man who flirted with disaster, cheated death, tempted fate and then laughed at all of them as he took glory home for cakes and coffee. This lead Spock, once again, to the most ironic of propositions as he found himself wondering how Captain Kirk would handle a situation like this.

The answer came to him almost as an axiom. "Mister Sulu, would you be willing to execute a feat of excessive heroics and blatant violation of common sense?"

Sulu half turned in his chair and grinned, "Like you have to _ask_! What have you got in mind?"


	15. Chapter 15

**EXODUS**

Talos-IV, Planet Surface  
Location Unknown  
Stardate Unknown  
Time Unknown

Kirk couldn't remember how he'd come to be in this tunnel, which in hindsight was probably a bad sign. The fact that it was a narrow circular tunnel on about a thirty incline was reassuring, though, since it suggested that if he traveled upwards long enough he would probably reach the top of the complex and some sort of exit to site of Talos City above. That, at least, is what he assumed was the logic that brought him into this passage in the first place, even though he could no longer remember it.

His assumption was vindicated when the sloping passage suddenly ended at a vaulted door that seemed to be operated mechanically with a set of pneumatic pistons. Kirk found a control on the front panel of the door, inset at almost knee height; he fiddled around with it for several minutes until he found which way to turn the little metal knobs, and finally the doors opened with an electric buzz and a hiss of hydraulic fluid being pumped. These doors opened to a large, elongated room with a high ceiling and long rectangular tables arranged parallel to the short axis of the room. Something about the place looked familiar to Kirk, but hearing the surprised gasp behind him he realized it looked a lot more familiar to Vina.

"The school!" she cried out, both overjoyed and dismayed at the same time. She raced through the opening, brushing past Kirk and spun through the room, taking in the sights. None of the lights were on save the LED lamps over the doors which were themselves padlocked shut and sealed from the outside. Not enough light to see by, and yet Vina seemed giddy with excitement. "My god, it's _real_! I thought it was just another one of their scenarios, but look at it! It's really here!"

Kirk had never actually seen this place from the inside, but it was the right size and shape to be the all-in-one town hall, cafertia and schoolhouse he'd seen at Talos City before. If it wasn't the same building, it was something remarkably similar.

"It could still be an illusion," Doctor Marcus said, coming out of the doors behind her, "I'm sure the Keeper's awake by now. "

"Why do you think so?" Vina asked.

Kirk grinned as he answered, "Because _you're_ awake. The others wouldn't be out much longer than you unless their nervous systems are a lot more sensitive than ours."

"They might be," Marcus said, "They _are_ telepaths."

"That's true." Kirk looked around the room, trying to capture Vina's sense of wonder and excitement, but the room was too dark for him to get any sort of impression from it. He couldn't even be sure that it was really night outside, and the lack of illumination could have been an illusion too.

Except the phaser in his hand was definitely not an illusion. He'd taken their enemies by surprise once already, and in the tunnels he'd used it to stun at least five Talosians who'd happened across their paths. There was no reason he could think of that the phaser wouldn't work now, and realizing this, Kirk wondered if the Talosians understood the dangers of using illusions as a defense. With the phaser in hand, he had the power to kill every single one of them without ever seeing the shots; he could accidentally bring the entire building down on their heads and none of them would know they were in danger until seconds before the ceiling crushed their bones into powder.

Kirk decided to force their hand. "Are you sure those doors are locked?" He asked.

Vina, still dancing around giddily, shuffled over to the nearest door and tugged on the handle. The door didn't budge. "Locked tight."

"Thought so. Get away from there, Vina, I'm gonna blow it down..." he hit the toggle switch on the back of the weapon and switched it to its maximum disruptor setting. He raised the weapon to aim at the door, but before he could squeeze the trigger he was struck with the belated realization that he was, in fact, holding the phaser directly to Doctor Marcus' temple. "Shit!"

 _"Again, the instant resort to violence."_ The thought exploded in his mind with a forcefulness that bordered on violence. It was startling and jarring, and it was clearly meant to be. _"This simply will not do."_

"You call _us_ violent?" Kirk asked, powering down the phaser. He didn't know for sure if he'd really pointed the phaser at Carol's head or not, but he sure as hell wasn't going to take that chance _now_. "We don't go around shooting people and abducting them against their will."

"Of course you do, Captain. We would not be having this conversation if it were otherwise."

Kirk flinched, "What's _that_ supposed to mean?"

"Your actions are guided by arrogance, your view of reality is colored by prejudice," Said an alien voice somewhere in front of him. The lights in the room flickered on, and then the Keeper was in the middle of them, glaring at them arrogantly. "These are the indicators of a primitive, under-evolved species."

Kirk looked at the vaulted door they had come through to get here. It was closed again, and locked from the inside, sealed as if it had never been opened, with two small marble statues sitting in front of it that would have blocked the door from opening. Kirk hadn't noticed it closing before and now he found it difficult to remember how he opened it or when, if ever, they had ever come through it.

 _Why do the Talosians want to keep me from seeing that?_ More importantly, he suddenly found he couldn't clearly remember any of the details of the passageway itself or any part of the complex they had passed through to get this far. They had escaped from the cage and taken Vina with them... and fled... and eventually arrived...

"Your aggressive tendencies will be curtailed in time," The Keeper said, his eyestalks pulled back a bit more, "So long as you are in our custody, your lives will be carefully guided at all times. Your attempts to escape will accomplish only what we will allow them to accomplish." Looking up at Kirk, he continued, "We have observed that your species has a natural predilection for modesty, as has come to light in Doctor Marcus' various sexual fantasies. She has not, for example, envisioned a mating with you in any public setting or in the presence of Vina. On the contrary, she is-"

Marcus snorted, "Cut the crap, Keeper. You're not as good at reading me as you think you are."

The Keeper looked at her quizzically, then went on, "As you are clearly resistant to the younger female, we have decided to grant you and Doctor Marcus a selection of private dwellings in which to copulate. The two of you will be left alone until you have completed this task."

Kirk laughed, "You know good and damn well we're not going to cooperate with you. There's nothing you can do to us that could compel us to go along with this."

"Not to _you_ , no. It was proposed that you should be left here in the wilderness until you have accepted your new life, compelled to do so by the combination of hunger and exposure. My conclusion is that your sense of duty outweighs your basic survival instincts, as does your dependence on the trappings of civilization."

Doctor Marcus snorted, "Do you _hear_ yourself when you talk?"

"Therefore," The Keeper went on, "your choice has been simplified: you will now begin to perform the tasks as we will lay out to you, or I will destroy your ship."

Marcus and Vina were both on their feet in an instant. "Can he really do that?" Vina asked.

"Maybe," Marcus said, "We don't know their maximum range. _If_ they can reach that far, they might be able to manipulate Scotty into working the wrong control or-"

"Do it, then." Kirk said, raising the phaser to begin adjusting its settings, "Destroy the ship. Go right ahead."

The Keeper's grin subsided, "I do not sense your challenge is sincere."

"Your _threat_ wasn't sincere. You're not going to murder seven hundred people just because the three of us won't cooperate. You're twisted, but you're not _evil_." Kirk finished adjusting the settings on his phaser, then aimed it at the ground and pulled the trigger. "I, on the other hand..."

The phaser didn't fire as expected, but a bright orange glow formed around the emitter and the phaser began to emit a low, rising hum.

Doctor Marcus instinctively lunged backwards from him, "Are you out of your mind?!"

Vina also took a step back, but was less sure why. "What did you just do?"

"I set my phaser on overload," Kirk said, "Gonna be a nice big crater right where we're standing, Keeper. Better clear out."

The Keeper's grin had completely vanished, now replaced with a look of absolute horror. It was probably the first genuine emotion Kirk had ever seen on the little alien's face. "This action makes no sense! You would really destroy yourselves rather than accept captivity?!"

"You've had an Earth vessel in your possession for two and a half decades, Keeper," Kirk said as the whine of the phaser rose, "You've had a chance to examine our records and our history. So tell me, how do humans _usually_ respond to captivity?"

"Your history includes _many_ forms of forced servitude. You have enslaved millions of your own species for mere convenience, for punishment, for military service, even for sexual pleasure. You are not unfamiliar with such practices..."

"Then you know how strongly we _detest_ those practices. We spent hundreds of years and fought three major wars to end slavery on our _own_ world. What makes you think I'm going to father a race of slaves for _yours_? Let me ask you another question," Kirk checked the power readout on the phaser. It was perhaps thirty seconds away from a detonation, so he would have to talk fast, "Suppose Carol and I _did_ start a family. Do you really think I would hesitate to kill every last one of you to protect our children?"

This seemed to give the Keeper pause, and he stopped to consider the question. But another voice came into the room, this time from one of the statues that Kirk now saw wasn't really a statue but was one of the two companions that had been with the Keeper during his first visitation at Kirk's cell. "It is as I tried to tell you, Keeper," said the Watcher, shedding his camouflage, "Their kind is simply too volatile to use for our purposes. They are willful and rebellious, and will use any opportunity to turn against us."

Kirk looked at the phaser again. Ten seconds, maybe less.

The Keeper looked down at the ground, suddenly morose. "Contact your ship, Captain Kirk. You may go."

Kirk took his finger off the trigger and switched the phaser off the overload setting. The rising hum of the weapon subsided quickly; in that same instant, he became aware that his communicator was still on his belt, that it had in fact always been on his belt and had never been removed in the first place. The Talosians had simply kept him from seeing it or using it until now. "Just like that?" Kirk barked a laugh, "No apologies, no explanation... you've kidnapped our people, threatened my ship..."

"Your unsuitability has condemned the Talosian race to eventual extinction," The Dreamer said, likewise allowing Kirk and Marcus to see him for the first time, "Is this not sufficient?"

"No other species has shown your adaptability," The Keeper added with a note of sadness, " _You_ were our last hope."

Kirk frowned, "Your species can't survive without a slave labor cast?"

"Once, decades ago, our society was divided into a class of workers and a class of thinkers. The division between them grew at a geometric rate: the intelligence and quality of life for the workers deteriorated until they were little better than animals, while the intelligence and lifestyle of the thinkers became almost godlike. Eventually the worker class rebelled. Not all at once, but in packs, in surges. In a series of wars they destroyed themselves, bringing their masters down with them." The Keeper sighed, "The survivors of the thinking class never rebuilt. It has been _generations_ since affecting real change on our world has been as easy as imagining it. In every corner of this planet, our brothers and sisters starve to death over imaginary feasts and bleed to death in imaginary hospitals. Our people have built nothing with their own hands in almost one hundred of your years. Without a new working class, our species is doomed."

Doctor Marcus asked, "Wouldn't some kind of trade or mutual cooperation...?"

The Keeper shook his head, " _Your_ species would learn our power of illusion and destroy itself too."

Kirk's communicator was already beeping with a contact signal from the Enterprise. Careful to keep his eyes on the Keeper, he snapped open his communicator and answered, "Kirk here."

"Captain Kirk," Spock said, "We have just located your communicator signal. The local electronic interference has been lifted."

Kirk nodded, "We're beaming back to the ship, Mister Spock. Our business here-"

"I can't go with you," Vina said, taking a small step forward.

Kirk raised a brow, "Can't or _won't_?"

"Jim, I've been here for," she sighed, "Twenty five years. This has been my life so long, I don't _remember_ much else."

The Keeper turned slightly, shuffling his legs to look directly at Vina.

"Show him," Vina said.

And turning back to face him, the Keeper _did_.

.

Talos-IV, Lower Ionosphere  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.43

\- 0047 hours -  
A holographic display painted in the air over Lieutenant Sulu's helm console told him everything he needed to know about the Enterprise's attitude and altitude, and a detailed graphical display of the terrain around and beneath him helped keep track of their location relative to the surface. His eyes darted back and forth between both twice or three times a second, building a mental picture in his mind as he made minute adjustments to the ship's course and speed. Most of this was unnecessary; his attention to detail was superfluous, and the margin of error for the ship's trajectory was so wide that he could go another ten minutes without touching the controls and still achieve the same results.

And yet Sulu was a perfectionist, and he never turned down a challenge, especially one of his own making. His goal now was to maneuver the Enterprise into a perfect position for the maximum possible efficiency of the transporter system. It might only save them a handful of seconds or it might save them several minutes or more. The important thing was, _details mattered,_ and Sulu was determined to get it right.

In his concentration, he was nearly oblivious to the spectacle raging just outside of the viewscreen. Enterprise was now moving through the upper atmosphere of Talos Four faster than any meteorite this world had ever known, but he'd barely noticed the flaming incandescence that rolled over the top of the saucer section and broke against the bridge-section forcefields like high-tide surf. He hadn't noticed the rising twilight coming over the horizon or the haze of condensation as their speeding starship, still flying many times the speed of sound in this atmosphere, plunged still deeper into the Talosian sky. Even less he noticed the increasingly urgent reports from Ensign Chekov and the answers from Commander Spock as the dialog between them grew more desperate by the minute.

"Intruder wessel detected in low orbit, Commander! Closing on our position!"

"How long until weapons range, Ensign?"

"If they maintain speed, Intruder will be in attack position in four minutes, but unless they enter the atmosphere with us they'll only be able to _maintain_ that position for ten minutes."

And Spock was half expecting them to actually pursue the Enterprise into the atmosphere. But their reluctance made sense: they couldn't deploy their weapons array in a high-gravity environment, and the bulkier Victory - almost four times Enterprise's volume - was at a serious maneuvering disadvantage in an atmosphere. The commander of that ship had the clear tactical advantage, but he was cautious, methodical. He was here on a mission, not an adventure.

Spock clicked the intercom switch on the armrest. "Bridge to shuttlebay. We are approaching area of operations, standby for shuttle deployment." He clicked off the intercom and added, "Ensign Chekov, maintain full shields until we arrive at our destination. Lieutenant Uhura," he turned his chair slightly, "Has Victory replied to our hails?"

Uhura shook her head, "No contact on any frequency. _If_ they're even receiving us, there's been no reply."

 _That_ was certainly no surprise. The political fallout from the crash of the Vengeance and the murder of Admiral Marcus had transformed Section 31 from a secretive counter-intelligence operation to political refugees practically overnight. Likely its remaining members were taking that rather personally, especially with regards to the people most directly responsible for their fall from grace.

On the other hand, the Talosians weren't all that communicative either. In fact, their dealings with the aliens\ had been limited only to their hostility and whatever they had chosen to share with their captives. But once before, Enterprise had made a show of forcibly extracting those captives and the Talosians had responded by mobilizing the colonists to defend them. With the deflector dish still pumping out subspace interference, that was no longer an option for them...

"Try haling the colonists," Spock said as the idea occurred to him, "They may be monitoring our signals via their shuttlecraft."

Uhura nodded, "It's worth a try, but Commander it's well before sunrise down there. I doubt anyone would even be awake to hear it."

"That can't be helped," Spock said, "Perhaps we will get lucky."

Still skeptical, Lieutenant Uhura switched the ship's transmitter to the ship-to-ground channels and tied in the shuttlecraft channels as well. And just for good measure, she put another signal at the old orbital relay channel - 431MHz, the channel that for almost two hundred years had been the standard band for space suited construction workers to shout insults at each other and anyone within their direct line of sigh. All of this carried the same message as she announced into her console's pickup, "Talos City, this is USS Enterprise, now approaching your position. Please respond."

"Intruder is moving to a lower orbit," Chekov announced, "Firing range in sixty seconds."

Sulu added, "We'll be over the target in _eighty_ seconds, Commander."

The mathematics sounded grim, but Spock understood there was enough nuance in those numbers that the situation was far from hopeless. "Fire control, arm phaser banks, standby for high-deflection intercept."

Lieutenant Stiles was in the tactical station today, much to Spock's amusement, and answered with his usual smooth efficiency, "Arming phasers, Sir. Set for high-deflection intercept. Commander, I can calculate that from a low-orbit firing position, we'll have about two minutes warning before their torpedoes enter phaser range. But once they do, we'll only have about twenty five seconds to shoot them down."

"Understood," Spock thumbed the intercom control to the engine room, "Spock to engineering. Standby for elevated output as we will be extending our deflector shields to maximum effective range. Repeat, standby to extend deflectors to maximum range. Bridge out."

Uhura suddenly sat bolt upright in her chair, "Picking up targeting scans from Intruder. I think they're..." then her head snapped around to another monitor on the other side of her console, "Spock! I've got the Captain's locator signal! It just came active a moment ago!"

The timing, Spock thought, was highly suspicious. But then Jim Kirk was better known for his luck than his sense of timing. "Try to contact him."

Uhura sent the contact signal and the reply was almost as immediate as it was welcome. "Kirk here."

"Captain Kirk," Spock said, trying and mostly succeeding to keep the relief from flooding his voice, "We have just located your communicator signal. The local electronic interference has been lifted."

Kirk grunted in the affirmative. His voice sounded incongruously calm considering the crisis now unfolding in the skies above him. "We're beaming back to the ship, Mister Spock. Our business here..." he trailed off, but didn't close the channel. There were other voices in the background, barely audible, plus a series of low clicking noises that Spock immediately understood to be the Talosian equivalent of a spoken language.

The Keeper was with the Captain even now. And Kirk was possibly unaware of this fact, and being actively kept unaware of it by alien influence. The Talosians had lifted the interference, but they weren't quite finished with their mind games...

Spock almost jumped to his feet and strode towards the turbolift door. "Chekov, please page Doctor McCoy and a security team to the transporter room. Mister Bailey, maintain tracking of-"

"Fast movers!" Bailey announced as his heads up display suddenly lit up with a half dozen small reticules, each tracking a small fast moving projectile, "Verified! Ten photon torpedoes incoming, bearing one eight seven mark sixty. Impact in three minutes!"

"Do whatever is necessary to protect the ship, Mister Sulu," Spock stepped into the turbolift and hit the key for C-deck, saying as the doors hissed close, "You have the conn."

.

\- 0050 hours -  
There had always been something slightly unreal about Vina. Her mannerisms, her attitude, even her _name_ seemed to be affectations that belonged to a person she was pretending to be but could never truly measure up to. But in another life, in another time and place, she had been Lieutenant Commander Divina Hernandez, senior geologist for the Commercial Exploration Research Vessel Columbia, New Horizons Corporation, Colony Division.

It was this Lieutenant Commander Divina Hernandez that now appeared in front of Kirk from a fog of imagination he hadn't known was hiding her. Once, a generation ago, she had been a stunningly beautiful woman, possibly even more perfect than the image the Talosians had placed in Kirk's mind. But a catastrophic starship crash and twenty five years on a desolate planet with only her abusers for company had worn her down to nothing: in the tatters of a New Horizons jumpsuit, Divina Hernandez was a woman in her late seventies, the stump of a severed left arm hanging uselessly from a shoulder that lacked either collar bones or a scapula; scar tissue had grown over the right side of her face where a shattered cheekbone had never properly healed, and what Kirk had imagined to be lengths of beautiful black hair had turned white with age and ragged from lack of care.

Kirk knew, somehow, that Vina had very few days left ahead of her. He swallowed his questions and waited for her to tell him in her own words.

"They're really very kind, Jim," Vina said, her voice a distant, hoarse rumble now, "They've shown me such beauty, such pleasure..."

"An _illusion_ of beauty," Kirk said, "An _illusion_ of pleasure. What could..." there was a distant triple clap of thunder in the air and the walls shook as if the building itself had been startled. Marcus and Vina raised their eyes, puzzled by the sound, and the Keeper's people seemed not to notice it at all. Kirk recognized it immediately as the sonic boom caused by a massive object moving through the atmosphere at several times the speed of sound, and the three-fold clap of it was a distinct effect made by a Constitution class starship in a full-power descent.

 _What the hell is Spock doing?_

The Keeper thumped his feet contemplatively, "Vina will want for nothing as long as she is in our care. We will accommodate her every need. On this, you have our solemn promise."

"Promises from you aren't worth a damn, Keeper, but I guess I don't have much choice." Kirk snapped open his communicator again, waited for the response from the Enterprise before ordering, "Spock..." he looked at Vina one more time before ordering, "Two to beam up."

"Yes, Captain. Energizing." There was almost no delay; Kirk felt the tingling sensation of a transporter beam enveloping him, and then the odd sensation of being phased out of reality by means unknown.

Then he found himself on the transporter pad amidst a sea of swirling orange light. Doctor Marcus was behind him and Commander Spock was in front of him, along with Lieutenant Uhura and Ensign Chekov. Everything was where it should be, everything was _what_ it should be. The sense of illusion and unreality he'd felt before was gone.

So when he looked over and saw the Keeper standing on the transporter pad next to him, inside of a small transparent-aluminum dome mounted on an antigrav platform, he couldn't help but question his surroundings again. "What in-"

But the Keeper beat him to it, with a cry of outrage and alarm too intense to be an act, "What is the meaning of this?! Why have you abducted us?!" It actually took Kirk a moment to realize the Keeper was speaking at all, as the voice sounded nothing like the Keeper's voice. Finally he realized it was merely a _translation_ of the awkward clicks and squawks trickling through the transparency; until now, the Keeper's language had been translated in his mind, and only the absence of the Keeper's mental link allowed Kirk to hear what the aliens were _really saying._ Slightly more surprising was Vina - in some half-measure semblance of her illusory beauty - standing on the last transporter pad behind him, looking utterly perplexed both at her own appearance and at the transporter room around her. She _was_ much older than the Talosians had made her appear, but hardly the disfigured wretch they'd shown Kirk on the surface.

"Talosian," Spock said, and then looked at the other two transporter pads where the Watcher and Dreamer had also materialized, both of them just as puzzled and frustrated as the Keeper inside of their little domes, "You are under arrest on charges of kidnapping, piracy, and attempted murder. You will note that the gravity on the transporter pad has been adjusted to conform to normal Talosian gravity. Beyond this chamber and the antigrav enclosures, the ship's environment is maintained at one standard gravity. I caution you that any attempt to render further illusions will be useless as you are fully isolated from the ship's environment, and any attempt to escape would likely prove fatal."

"I can see that, _Vulcan_! I see now this has been a Federal subterfuge from the beginning! You will suffer for this, I promise you!"

"Chief," Spock nodded at a line of security officers in full encounter suits, and behind them all, Lieutenant Janice Rand standing tall and confident, her lower body braced by a power-assist frame. The security men picked up the three Talosians by the handles of their cages and carried them out of the room like so much freight. They were replaced almost immediately by medical staffers who swarmed around Kirk, Marcus and Vina like baitfish around a shark.

Vina was the first to ask what they were all thinking. "What's going on?"

"Divina Hernandez," Lieutenant Rand announced, "Please stay where you are, Doctor McCoy will be along shortly with an antigrav."

"Why do I need an antigrav?"

"Because _you're_ not adapted to this gravity any more than the Talosians are," Rand said.

Vina looked down at herself, marveling at her own appearance. She saw what was there, saw what wasn't there, saw that whatever she had assumed herself to be behind the mask of illusion had been, in the end, just another lie; almost immediately she fell to her knees, quietly sobbing, emotionally exhausted.

Kirk moved towards Vina to say something reassuring, but the floor beneath him suddenly leapt five meters to starboard and he found himself tumbling into the wall of the transporter chamber, bouncing off his shoulder and collapsing to his hands and knees. The red alert claxon blared all through the ship and somewhere on the intercom a damage control officer was calling for a medical team on E-deck.

Struggling back to his feet, Kirk managed a ragged, "What the hell was _that_?!"

"The ship is under attack," Spock said, starting for the double doors in the back of the room.

Following him in stride Kirk asked, "By who? The Talosians?"

"A Federation dreadnought entered orbit with us yesterday evening. It has refused communications since it arrived, and seems to be fitted with a cloaking device."

Kirk barely heard Spock say anything after the word 'Dreadnought' but he took this news in stride as he followed his first officer into the corridor. Another jolt shook the ship, throwing both of them against the side of the rounded corridor; Kirk heard the distant whine of the main engines spooling up, adding more power to the deflectors to keep the raw power of those torpedo warheads from coming any closer to the ship. "Spock," Kirk shouted after him, "There are still seventy five colonists down on the surface! We can't just leave them there!"

Spock nodded, knowingly, as if this had been the plan all along. "Shuttles have already deployed," Spock said, "But we cannot protect them for long."

Kirk picked up his pace for the turbolift as he growled, "Long _enough_! Let's get these people out of here!"

.

\- 0052 hours -  
At almost any other time of year, the distant roll of thunder wouldn't have bothered her at all. Thunderstorms weren't uncommon here, especially during the perihelion months when Talos-IV was closest to the primary star. But coming now only a few days after the Klingon air raid, and that in turn immediately after the Starfleet commandos attacked the colony, Ricca was a little more sensitive than usual to loud noises. At the sound of the sonic boom, she was upright in her bunk and holding still as a statue, listening for any other sounds that might accompany that first alarming noise. She'd expected there to be something subtle, like the sounds of boots stomping through the garden or the distant crackle of maneuvering jets from shuttles or landing craft coming to raid her homeland again.

Instead, she heard the distant otherworldly howl of a starship's warp engine being powered up, a sound like a thousand banshees wailing in anger, calling out for her blood. The sound alone filled her with terror, not just for the loud hollow noise of it, but for the sheer power behind it; as it came closer, it shook the windows and the walls, rattled the frame of her bunkbed and made her teeth chatter.

The Federation starship wasn't even over the valley yet when its searchlights illuminated the top of the hill in a false daylight. The blazing red fire of its impulse engines crackled in the air behind it and the pale blue glow from its deflector dish shone like a full moon. Like all of the colonists, Ricca had seen Columbia from a distance and had a few times even seen it from the air during a shuttle ride; she'd seen the historical vids - even the ones she wasn't supposed to see - that depicted what that old starship would have looked like when still whole and flying in space. She'd thought, once, that SS Columbia must have been the largest spacecraft ever built by human hands.

The starship Enterprise made Columbia look like a children's toy.

Behind the din of the engine noise and the blowing wind she heard confused voices shouting outside. She recognized Victor's voice, and some of the other men who had hastily formed a militia after the first attack. But she also heard other voices she didn't recognize, and looking through the window next to her bunk, she saw that those voices belonged to a trio of gold-shirted Starfleet officers. And they weren't alone; a dozen or so others were moving around in front of the other dorms, having similar arguments with the adults there. Something about a danger, about evacuation, about something called Section Thirty One...

The Magistrate was in orbit, Ricca realized. They'd been expecting his return any day now, but Starfleet just happened to be here when he arrived.

The shouted argument came to an abrupt end when the higher-pitched whistles of shuttlecraft engines finally pierced the audible scream of the approaching starship. The giant white hull settled overhead, the numbers _NCC-1701_ painted on the belly of a service module that was bigger than their entire hill. Beneath it, six blocky shapes were descending in a loose formation, and Ricca watched them come to rest almost side-by-side in a field, giving the garden - and their dorms - a wide berth. She noted, with interest, that none of the new weapons Colfax or Talman were boasting about had even been fired at them, and no one was running over to the parking lot to start up the shuttles that had helped drive off the Klingon raiders the day before yesterday. Everyone was so stunned by the arrival of that starship that it simply didn't occur to anyone that fighting back was a possibility.

 _Shock and awe_ had once been the term for that. During the Eugenics Wars it had become the punchline of many jokes at the expense of the American Empire. But none of those twenty first century military adventurers ever had access to a half-mile-long flying monstrosity like a Constitution class starship. It was an unsubtle and effective as messages got: _Starfleet is here. Deal with it._

If there had been cause for argument before, there wasn't any now. Ricca heard the door to her dorm being thrown open and saw Doctor Haskins stomping into the room with an LED lamp in one hand. "Alright, everyone, listen," he was trying to keep his voice calm, but his eyes looked terrified, "Pack up your things. Just what you can carry, nothing you can do without. Then meet outside in two minutes."

One of the boys on the other side of the cabin asked, "Are we being invaded or something?"

"No, of course not. The Magistrate wouldn't allow it. But there is a bit of a problem in right now, and Starfleet wants us to evacuate to their ship until this all blows over."

"We're coming _back_ though, right?" One of the adults asked. Ricca didn't recognize him for some reason, and she realized it was because she had never actually seen what the man looked like. She recognized the voice, but for some reason she had always imagined him to look like something else.

In fact, _everything_ looked a little bit different now. A little dirtier, a little smaller, a little less comfortable. Less like the home she wanted to live in and more like the prison she had always believed this to be, if only in the most abstract of terms.

It couldn't have been more obvious if Haskins had shouted it himself. "The illusions are gone!" she shouted.

Haskins looked at her with a look of surprise. The _wrong_ kind of surprise. Not surprised by the revelation, or by the implications. Surprised that she'd _noticed_.

"She's right," someone else shouted, "this place is... does that the mean the Keepers...?"

"We'll answer all your questions on the ship," Haskins shouted and ducked back through the door, "Two minutes! Don't be late!"

"Just what I can carry," Ricca said to herself, "Nothing I can do without." Only two things came to mind. She grabbed her tablet computer and a knapsack with her favorite work clothes and didn't bother to change out of her pajamas as she tugged it on her back.

Half of the colony was already outside by the time Ricca came through the door of her dormitory, most of them walking slowly and uncertainly towards the Starfleet shuttlecraft in the middle of the field. The red- and gold-shirted officers seemed calm, but tense; they kept making "move along" gestures or "come faster" gestures, gentle chants of encouragement in a half dozen languages. Ricca moved towards the shuttles too, if only because she couldn't think of a good enough reason not to; their tremendous starship was hanging over their heads like a giant hammer waiting to come down on a stubborn little nail, so as far as Ricca was concerned that meant they were in charge. Closer to the shuttles, she heard muttered profanity from some of the adults, heard anxious laughter from some of the kids, and heard a peculiar clicking sound from what she suddenly recognized was a perfectly visible Talosian sitting immobilized in the middle of the vegetable garden. It was rare for the Talosians to let themselves be seen in the open like this; it must have been as stupefied as the rest of them by the spectacle of the starship hovering over their heads...

There was a flash of light from above, and the starship became a shadow, silhouetted against an impossibly bright light that practically filled the sky. Ricca closed her eyes tightly, blinking through a persistent after-image until the world was clear enough that she could resolve shapes again. The blinding light had collapsed into a fireball that was now dimming from blinding white to a blazing, garish orange and rising high into the sky to form a mushroom cloud just a few kilometers above the spine of the Enterprise, and only then did the soundwave catch up to the light flash; even muffled by Enterprise's deflector shields, the explosion was _still_ the loudest thing she had ever heard in her life. A few moments later, she saw bluish-white streaks of phaser pulses darting over the top of the saucer section, racing into the sky. Then another bright flash, and then another, mushroom clouds forming and them quickly cooling in the atmosphere.

Bodies rushed to the shuttlecraft hatches now like rabbits diving into burrows. No one was walking anymore.

Nothing about this situation could possibly be real. Ricca remembered how her mother was killed by the Magistrate for trying to teach her how to block out their illusions. Wrong thinking was punished, and wrong action was unforgivable. Your thoughts defined your actions and your actions defined your reality. This, Ricca realized, had to be some kind of loyalty test. The Keeper and his two stooges were famous for pulling that kind of crap. They'd stage scenarios that would give the colonists an opportunity to rebel, and anyone who seized the chance would be punished or killed. In fact, they'd been doing it more and more in recent days; the illusion of the winter storm that shut down the power grid for an entire week, and then the illusion of the Starfleet officers who had come in response to a distress signal Doctor Haskins had supposedly sent out years ago. Then there was the Klingon air raid day before yesterday; the Keeper had punished the entire colony for not moving fast enough to fight them off.

This was another test. Maybe even the _final_ test. If Ricca let fear drive her to betray the colony, if she let her wrong thoughts lead her to a wrong action, the Magistrate would do worse than _punish_ her. She, and everyone else who failed this test would soon die horrible, painful deaths at the hands of horrors only they could see. And Ricca would be buried in an unmarked grave in the little cemetery at the edge of town. Just like Vina...

 _Just like mom._

"Right thinking my ass!" Ricca rushed to her feet and ran for the nearest shuttlecraft. Her legs weren't working as well as they were supposed to and the knot of people lining up at the hatch was already too thick. She changed directions and headed for the next furthest one. A gold-shirted Starfleet officer reached down from the hatch and helped her aboard, and a dozen others scrambled up the hatch just behind her. She ducked through the cramped spacecraft to find an empty seat; the viewports flashed around her and the fading light told the story of yet another fireball detonating somewhere outside, followed by yet another mind-shattering _boom_ as the sound of the blast finally reached them.

"What the hell _is_ that?!" someone shouted. Another adult with a voice she recognized but a face she didn't.

The gold-shirted Starfleet officer with the answered, "Photon torpedoes. Enterprise has extended her deflectors to screen us." Three more people scrambled into the hatch and dove into seats, nearly filling the shuttlecraft. The green-skinned officer pulled the hatch shut, then slapped the bulkhead next to him three times as he dove into his own seat near the front of the compartment.

"Someone's firing _torpedoes_ at us?" Ricca asked.

Gold-shirt didn't answer. He seemed nervous, unsure of himself. Ricca thought she recognized him; he looked like one of the officers that had visited them before from Starfleet. Jose, was it? Jose Tyler?

The shuttle was already starting to move, swaying beneath them like a living thing. Through the viewports on the wall opposite her, Ricca could see the ground shrinking away from them, the little cluster of buildings that was Talos City receding into the distance. The Enterprise, also, was falling away behind them, its full profile visible now as it hung in the middle of the air above the hilltop that had been their home for as long as she could remember. Phaser bolts were flying out from the hull, reaching into the distance where spreads of photon torpedoes were invisibly raining down on them from higher up in orbit. And just as the shuttle began to turn, Ricca saw the streaks of a half dozen bright orange fireballs snaking down from the sky, skirting the edge of the Enterprise's slowly contracting deflector field. Phaser bolts struck two of them down in mid air, destroying them without detonating, but the last found its way beneath the ship's protective bulk and detonated in the air just above the city. And then a second. And then a _third_...

The explosion was so loud that it shattered the window across from her and burst one of her eardrums. The shuttle shook violently around her and then she felt the sensation of tumbling. Someone near the front of the craft shouted a warning and alarm bells sounded all through the compartment. Ricca saw alternating glimpses of the sky and the ground and it wasn't hard to guess which one of them they were getting closer to.

Maybe they weren't testing everyone? Maybe they were only testing _her_? But if that was the case, what was the criteria for this test? The Keeper had always emphasized obedience under all circumstances, and the Magistrate - the few times he had made an appearance - had done the same. The Keeper's wishes were extreme and sometimes arbitrary, but they had never been ambiguous. _Wrong thinking is punished, right thinking is just as quickly rewarded._

"I'm sorry I ever doubted you," she muttered, closing her eyes tight, "I'm sorry, Keeper. I'll be good... I'll be good..."

Ricca opened her eyes and waited for the terrible illusion to fade away like it always did.

It didn't. "This isn't real!"

She saw the trees rushing up towards the shattered windows. Something in the passenger compartment was on fire. She felt a tingling sensation on the back of her neck and realized it was _her_.

"It's just an illusion..."

The Gold-shirted officer shouted something in Spanish. Someone in the cockpit shouted back in Orion. Both were screaming, terrified.

"This isn't re-"

Ricca felt the impact with every bone in her body, and then she felt _nothing_.


	16. Chapter 16

**RESORT TO VIOLENCE**

Talos IV, U'Shul Plateau  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.43

\- 0056 hours -  
"Shuttlecraft Aquarius is down," Spock announced, dispassionately reading off his science console as Sulu fought the helm controls to stabilize the ship, "No life forms detected in the wreckage... no survivors."

"Extend deflectors! Make sure the others get clear!" Kirk ordered. The torpedoes that had struck the base of the hill had apparently detonated something large enough and volatile enough that half the valley had been blasted flat by it and Enterprise herself had been thrown almost a thousand meters out of position by the shockwave. These were merely the latest reminders to Kirk why _everyone in the universe_ avoided starship combat in an atmospheric environment. Phaser weapons had limited range in an atmosphere and the energies of photon warheads were absorbed by the surrounding air before they could ever do any real damage to a starship. And yet the Enterprise was being tossed around by the shockwaves like a surfer in a tsunami; the same atmosphere that made the ship nearly impervious to harm had already put thirty crewmen in sickbay with broken bones and concussions as the ship was tossed back and forth around them. Meanwhile, everything on this planet _other_ than the Enterprise was being irradiated, crushed, blasted and superheated every time one of those warheads spent itself against the deflector shields.

Fighting in an atmosphere was, in a phrase, the _least_ productive thing you could possibly do with a starship.

But then, the _Enterprise_ hadn't been the target of those torpedoes in the first place. It had been clear from the path of the first salvo that the Dreadnought's attacks were directed at Talos City, likely an attempt to destroy the facility before the Enterprise could get to it. Orbital bombardment wasn't especially productive either, but as a means of eliminating the witnesses to a crime, it was remarkably effective.

"Shuttlecraft Pisces reports minor damage, but still operational," Spock said, "All shuttlecraft have left the kill zone and are now moving towards the secondary rendezvous point."

Kirk slapped his command chair triumphantly, "Where's that Dreadnought?"

"He's out of weapons range now," Sulu said, "But he's burning hard on impulse power, tossing to a higher orbit. I think he's trying to keep us in his line of sight."

"Waiting for us to get back into orbit," Kirk said, thinking out loud. The play was pretty obvious as it was: his best move was to wait for the Dreadnought's orbit to take it over the horizon and then try to escape at warp speed. The enemy had to do whatever it could to keep its sight lines on Enterprise, possibly even to the point of dropping into a powered hover in near space just so it could loiter over Talos City. A more practical helmsman would simply burn the engine shard and plane-change to a polar orbit, then plane-change again into a retrograde orbit, essentially circling Enterprise high up in space.

But then, catching Enterprise as it tried to make orbit wasn't the goal here. A Dreadnought could easily run the Enterprise down at maximum warp no matter where they tried to escape to. The enemy ship needed only know the general direction he was heading and then chase them down for the kill.

From his actions so far, Kirk realized, USS Victory's commander was a very practical man. He knew his advantages, and he was careful not to squander them. Kirk knew the type; they had the highest academic scores in Command School, fast tracked to all the best assignments, highest commendations and unit citations in the Federation. Those kinds of men didn't make decisions, they made _plans_. And the plans they came up with were as predictable as the textbooks they were based on...

Like a switch being pulled, Kirk had an idea. "Sulu, get us into orbit. Full impulse power. And just as a precaution, load all torpedo bays and standby phasers for anti-ship firing."

"Sir," Sulu half turned in his chair, "May I respectfully remind the Captain of our chances of successfully engaging a Dreadnought class starship?"

"What's wrong with our chances?" Kirk shrugged, "Statistically speaking, we've never actually _lost_."

Chekov asked, "Are you sure you did not loose your mind down there, Sir?"

"Their commander's got everything on us," Kirk said, "He's got speed and firepower and probably more shielding that we can penetrate. He's got us dead to rights, and he knows it."

Sulu added, "Sir, if he'd been focussing on the Enterprise instead of Talos City, we'd be _dead_ by now."

"Exactly," Kirk nodded, "So really, this is going to be _easy_."

Under her breath and to no one in particular, Uhura added, "Suicide usually _is_."

"Trust me, Hikaru," Kirk slapped him on the shoulder, smiling gamely, "Give me orbit. Full impulse power."

Sulu stared at him for a moment, then turned back to his console, took a deep breath and answered, "Full impulse power, aye Sir."

.

Talos-IV, Lower Ionosphere  
USS Victory (NCC-2506)  
Stardate 2261.43

\- 0112 hours -

There were worse things than death.

That was the thought that had been pounding constantly in his mind ever since he accepted this new assignment, a posting which did not officially exist, for a duration that was effectively indefinite. He'd accepted the sacrifices that came with it, the fact that doing so was a death sentence for his career and for him as well if he didn't succeed. He accepted permanent isolation from his family and friends on Earth and the possibility of never seeing the skies of his home again. If things didn't go as planned, he and his entire crew would likely end up dead.

But because there were worse things than death, Captain Lloyd Garth had accepted the assignment. The Federation was an oasis of civility in a savage and wild universe, surrounded on all sides by its enemies and infiltrated throughout by traitors and defeatists. These were desperate times that called for swift and decisive measures.

Section 31 had appeared to him as a group of officers willing to make the hard choices to keep the Federation safe; he hadn't agreed with them at first, but had seen them as a necessary evil that the Federation desperately needed. Now they were more than necessary, they were _essential_. And they needed him, needed his experience and his expertise; the second starship of the now-infamous Dreadnought class was a true weapon of war, an instrument of destruction unlike anything the galaxy had ever seen. Fourteen hundred meters long, massing over eight hundred thousand metric tons, and yet fully mission capable with a crew of thirty and operable - if barely - by a single man. Victory was as much an engineering marvel as it was a product of its times, but it needed a commander who understood how to properly wield such a magnificent weapon, and more importantly, a man who understood that the Federation's enemies were closer to home than anyone wanted to admit. _Garth of Izar_ was such a man, a hero the Federation deserved.

Garth had put the last ten years of his life into developing this Project Sleepwalker. The people subjected to the Talosian programming would live most of their lives never being aware of it; they would have no recollection of being activated, no knowledge of their pivotal role in the Federation's security, no idea how many lives they saved just by existing where they did. The program had already reaped benefits: thousands of lives had been saved because Section 31's operatives were able to get the assets they needed to act swiftly and quietly, and Garth knew of at least two planets that were safe from foreign invasion because one of the Sleepwalker assets had overheard a totally innocuous conversation between two captains at a deep space outpost. Sleepwalker agents had helped to bring the Klingon Empire to its knees, had helped prevent the collapse of the Andorian government, and had even helped Section 31 divert a Borg invasion away from Federation space. It was, without question, exactly the kind of asset that the Federation needed to remain safe.

And then there was James T. Kirk, the man whose meddling single handedly unraveled the Landru Experiment on Beta Three, whose antics delivered Phadeus Four into the arms of the Klingon Empire, whose smug self-importance had lead to the death of Admiral Marcus and the destruction of USS Vengeance along with eleven thousand innocent people caught in the path of the crashing Dreadnought. When the Keeper contacted Section 31 to warn them that a Starfleet vessel had lain siege to the facility, Garth had barely been surprised when it turned out to be Kirk. At best, the man was an idealistic meddler who stuck his nose where it didn't belong; at worst, as Garth now clearly understood, Kirk was a _traitor_.

That such a cretin had ever been allowed on the bridge of a starship was _beyond_ offensive. But Garth would make it right. That's what Section 31 was _for_ , after all.

"Contact, Sir!" his tracking officer, a young brunette with a faint German accent, shouted from the helm console, throwing a graphic on the main viewscreen. "One silhouette, bearing one four eight mark two, rising into orbit on impulse power. Constitution class starship, designate USS Enterprise."

"Hold your course," Garth said, "Wait till he goes to warp. Then we've got him."

The tracking officer glanced back at him, "This is Kirk we're talking about. Surely he's _expecting_ us to jump him at warp."

"Maybe. But what can he do about it?" Garth eyed the tracking officer suspiciously. Lieutenant Nadja Luther had been a classmate of Kirk's once, and even one of the top cadets at the academy until she was implicated in a series of terrorist bombings in and around Starfleet Academy. Her motives were selfish, but ultimately noble; she was another who understood that there were worse things than death, and the Federation deserved to be protected from those things, whatever the cost. Section 31 had gotten her out of prison, but only Lloyd Garth could get her the revenge she deserved against the man who had _twice_ betrayed her and everything she had ever believed in.

The tracking display showed a spherical projection of space around the ship, with a wireframe globe indicating the surface and atmosphere of Talos-IV. The Enterprise was a bright red dot on the edge of that sphere, rising along a flat parabola that extended from the surface of the planet to the far reaches of space. Garth could see that Enterprise was rising in a path that was roughly retrograde from Victory's orbit, heading off in the opposite direction relative to the planet's rotation. Probably hoping to get a head start in a mad warp-speed dash out of the system.

"Thermal spike," Luther announced. The infrared image on her monitor showed the Enterprise's intercoolers had just heated up top nearly a thousand kelvins.

"He's going to warp," Garth said, "Track his course and follow him."

Luther powered up the ship's main sensor dish and started a series of active scans. The first scan cycle was just finishing when Enterprise' nacelles flared and the ship vanished in a flash of light. Five seconds later the second cycle completed and the intercept computer had a solution to display. "Course laid in."

"Helm..."

"Sir!" The kid from Korea had never been an actual part of starship and Garth had a hard time remembering his name; he was enthusiastic, idealistic, and ruthlessly efficient under pressure. He was also one of the worst helmsmen Garth had ever seen, but to his credit at least he was a fast learner.

Victory's warp engines thrummed, a low-frequency growl that rose slowly into an angry buzz, like the sound of an old propeller plane being revved up. Through the transparency of the viewscreen and the tracking display graphics, Garth saw the stars beginning to shift position as if the universe itself had switched on a giant zoom lens. Then the image snapped, and a tunnel of fire engulfed them on all sides as they smashed triumphantly through the light barrier.

"I have their position," said Luther, "Twenty six million kilometers out. They're running at about warp two."

Garth's eyebrow jumped. Even without the retrofits for long-range missions, Enterprise should have been capable of at least warp eight.

"Overtake," Garth said, caution boiling in his chest. Was Kirk really trying to escape? Or was this some kind of trick?

"Sir, Yes Sir!" shouted the Korean and brought the ship to an intercept course. The buzzing growl of the engines became louder and angrier and for a few seconds rose into a high pitched wail like a Stuka dive bomber making a run. For a moment, the apparent "tunnel of light" outside the viewscreen phase-shifted from blueish white to a deep, bitter violet that was almost painful to look at.

Then the engine noise began to fade, and the tunnel stabilized. The tracking display switched to a tactical heads-up display and a small dark object appeared in the distance ahead of them.

"Coming up on phaser range," said Luther, taking up the joystick on her console for weapons control, "Eight thousand kilometers, closing fast."

"Be careful," Garth said, "Kirk is a bit of a hotshot, he might be up to something."

"How well I know!" Luther said, "Six thousand kilometers... Five thousand..."

Using phasers only, optimum firing range for most starships was a little over two hundred kilometers. Victory's theoretical maximum range was several times greater than that, but until now no one had ever put them to the test. "Lock phasers on target," he ordered, "Fire on my command."

"Phasers locked. Now at four thousand kilometers," Luther said, reading her display, "Three thousand... two thousand... reducing speed..."

The distant spec at the end of the tunnel had now become a shape, and in moments Garth found himself staring at the rear aspect of a Constitution class flagship. He had to admit, it was a shame it had come to this; Enterprise was a beautiful ship, built in sleek elegant lines that made the ship look as much like a work of art as a functional starship in deep space. Victory, by contrast, was all polyhedrons and mechanical elements; the ship was designed with purpose in mind and not so much as an afterthought given to aesthetics or style.

Fitting, in a way. In a battle between function and style, function won every time.

"Four hundred kilometers," Luther said tensely, "Three hundred..."

Garth clenched his fists over his arm rests. "Fire phasers."

Luther confirmed the lock and squeezed the trigger on the joystick. The two massive phaser turrets in Victory's secondary hull slewed onto the target and unleashed a storm of phaser bolts large enough to swallow a shuttlecraft in one blast. These tore into the Enterprise's unprotected flank like a flock of birds into a cloud bank...

But Enterprise was already moving. The bow tilted suddenly upwards and then starboard and the nacelles swung hard to port. The entire ship suddenly jackknifed in the warp tunnel just before Victory's phaser pulses could make contact, and then in a blink, the ship was gone.

"All stop!" Garth ordered.

The Korean barked, "Sir!" and cut warp power. Victory slammed to a halt, returning to normal space like a dolphin leaping out of an ocean of subspace to beach itself in the world of matter and energy. The tracking display came up on the viewscreen again and Lieutenant Luther announced, "Looks like he chopped power at the last minute. We overshot him by half a million kilometers."

"Reacquire target," Garth said, cooly, "Get us back in weapons range."

"Sir! I'm laying in an intercept course now!" shouted the Korean, "At full impulse power, we'll be in range in four minutes!"

"Goddamn hotshot," Garth said again, growling, "Go to full impulse, get us in close. Ready photon banks nine and ten for full dispersal firing on-"

"He's gone to warp again, Sir," Luther announced as the indicator on the tracking screen showed as much, "Tracking him."

Garth sighed, "Pursue."

"Course laid in. Engaging." Once again, Victory's warp engines thrummed and once again the ship leapt forward in space. It took slightly longer for Luther to get a target this time, but the inevitability of it all made it seem like just seconds. "Got him. Three hundred million kilometers. He's running at better than warp six."

Garth smiled, "So _that's_ what he's up to!"

Luther glanced back at him, "I don't follow, Sir."

"He _knows_ we can burst to high transwarp," Garth said, "He's gambling that our engines have limited endurance. If he makes us keep overtaking him, we won't be able to maintain pursuit."

"So he's pacing us..." Luther looked at the engine status board. The coolant system was working overtime, to be sure, but the overboost function _did_ put a significant jump on the engine temperature, "Damn... that might actually _work_."

"Not on my watch. Overtake!"

The Korean kid barked, "Sir! Overtaking target, Sir!"

And back to Luther, Garth asked, "Nadja, you knew Kirk at the Academy. What did _you_ think of the man?"

"He's creative," Luther said immediately, "Comes at you in ways you'd never thought of before. He's the one who arrested me, you know. I had him cornered with a phaser at the Argos Telescope... he pulled a spork out of his pocket and tripped an airlock panel."

"A spork?"

Luther nodded. "From the cafeteria. Blew us _both_ out into vacuum. I woke up in a jail cell twelve hours later with a bad case of the bends and with five consecutive life sentences."

"A _spork_ ," Garth said again, shaking his head, "Kirk has a reputation for being clever, but he sounds like an _asshole_."

"I wouldn't underestimate him. After all..." she trailed off as her console chirped, "Here we go. Ten thousand kilometers, closing fast."

"Don't give him a chance to chop power," Garth said, "Get right up his tailpipe and _nail_ him!"

"Eight thousand..." Luther said, "Six thousand... Four thous- _dammit_!" The viewscreen flashed, and half a second later the stars reappeared.

Garth blinked in confusion and almost leapt to his feet before he realized what had happened. "Did we overshoot?"

"Not by much!" Luther said proudly, "Target located! Bearing one two zero mark six, twenty thousand kilometers! I've already got guidance lock!"

"About time! Fire banks nine and ten and then get us into phaser range!"

Two armored armored hatches built into Victory's open-centered saucer module hinged open, and each of them belched a dozen photon torpedoes into space in a single, devastating spread. The torpedoes lit their engines in space, briefly looking like tumbling fireballs moving away from the ship, then gained speed and shot into the distance looking more like tracer bullets than self-guided projectiles.

"Torpedoes running normal," Luther announced, "Impact in twenty seconds."

"Sir! Phaser range in sixty five seconds, Sir!"

"Thank you, Ensign," Garth said, suppressing his annoyance. He stopped short of telling the kid to calm himself down; a little military discipline might actually do Starfleet some good, it seemed to him. "Has Enterprise returned fire?"

"Negative," Luther said, "In fact, they don't even have their shields up."

" _What_?!" Garth rose to his feet, folding his arms as he looked over Luther's shoulder at her tactical display. He was grinding his teeth now, the gears in his head turning faster and faster. "What the hell is he playing at?!"

"Picking up subspace emissions. High intensity. Looks like he's diverted power to his long range sensors."

"He's got thirty torpedoes on his ass, what the hell could he be scanning for?"

"An escape route, maybe? Or he could be..." Luther's console chirped and she growled in frustration, "He's gone to warp again!"

"Pursue." Garth jumped to his feet, kneeling over the helm console between Luther and the Korean as the ship once again surged to warp speed, "How many more times is he gonna try this?"

"I've got him dialed in," Luther punched some figures into the tracking display and then smiled, "Next time he tries it, I can drop us within six thousand kilometers. Han, give me helm control."

"Ma'am!" the Korean switched his controls over to automatic, and Victory's maneuvering controls now responded directly to Lieutenant Luther's deceleration program.

"Closing distance now," Luther said, "Enterprise is running at... warp _nine_! Look at that sucker move!"

"Overtake," Garth said, knowing it needed no saying.

"We're on him, Sir."

The engine noise changed to its angry buzz. Victory was now in full overwarp, a transwarp velocity so high they were violating half the known laws of physics just by attempting it. In a handful of seconds the distance between the two ships vanished; Garth could almost see the outline of the Enterprise on his viewer. "Range!"

"Ten thousand kilometers, closing..." Then Luther raised a brow, "He's gone to warp _ten_!"

"He's rabbiting! Get us closer!"

"Warp ten point two... point three..."

"Range!" Garth thundered.

"Eight thousand kilometers!" she answered, "Seven thousand!"

"Lock phasers!"

Luther toggled the phaser lock for the second time and felt the gratification as the system managed to highlight her target again. "Six thousand kilometers!"

"Look at those thermals!" said the Korean, "His engines are superheating!"

"Four thousand kilometers!" Luther announced, "Three thousand... two thousand..." her console barked a warning, "He's cutting power! We're decelerating!"

"Gotcha, you bastard!" Garth stood tall and triumphant behind the helm console as he gave the order, "Bring us about and lock phas-"

He never finished that sentence. In the space of the first two syllables, Enterprise chopped power to its warp drives and came to a sudden violent stop as it emerged back into normal space; two milliseconds later the still-decelerating USS Victory slammed into the upper atmosphere the bluish-green gas giant that had been directly in Enterprise's path, still traveling over one hundred and forty times the speed of light at the moment of impact.

Three hundred and ninety seven years in the future, a group of astronomers and history enthusiasts would form an unlikely coalition at the Korolev telescope on the far side of Earth's moon to observe the flash of light from this event. For a little over two days, the explosion of Talos-VII of would be the brightest star in the sky, outshining Arcturus, Canopus, and briefly even Sirius. Two hundred years earlier, the tribesmen of Capella IV would observe a flash of light in the night sky that bathed their entire world in a temporary false daylight, an event which would be interpreted as a good omen for the birth of a new chieftain the following morning. And seven hours from now, Talos-IV would experience a "false summer" and the first of twelve consecutive nights significantly brighter than its days.

On the bridge of the Enterprise, however, there was only a stunned silence at the sight of the seventh planet of the Talos Star System blooming into a white-hot fireball from the titanic release of energy that had just been thrown into its core. The shockwaves from Victory's collision would expand through the entire planet at the speed of sound, and it would still take over four hours for it to spread through the entire planet; in less time than that, the metallic hydrogen in the upper core would begin to undergo nuclear fusion, and the chain reaction would briefly transform Talos-VII into a white dwarf star until in a few days more it finally blew its outer layers into space leaving only a the burnt out husk of the planet and a vast circular plasma field ringing the outer solar system like a belt. Life in the Talos Star group would never quite be the same again.

Life on the USS Enterprise, however, had never been any different.

"See?" said Captain Kirk, grinning at the chaos erupting in the viewscreen, " _That_ wasn't so hard."

Doctor McCoy folded his arms and glowered at him, "I can't believe that ridiculous plan of yours actually _worked."_

"You should have a little more faith in me," Kirk bowed slightly, then walked back to his command chair, dropped into his seat, buried his face in his hands and sighed deeply. Then he wanted for his hands to stop shaking - and waited for the aching on his forearms to subside where the second-to-last deceleration had thrown him against the ceiling with far more force than he'd anticipated - and then sat up straight in his chair and ordered, "Sulu, get us back to Talos-IV before _anyone else_ shows up to this party."

"Course laid in, Sir," Sulu said after a moment, "Maximum warp."

Kirk sat up straighter in his chair for a moment, fidgeted slightly, slouched and straightened again. Then he turned to face Spock, stood up slowly, and then sat back down as wave after wave of fatigue smashed through his skeleton like a series of minor Earthquakes.

Spock was at his side in seconds and asked quietly, "Are you alright, Captain?"

Kirk sagged, resting his elbows on his knees, "Fine. It's just been a long couple of weeks..." He looked up suddenly, "How many were on Aquarius when it went down?"

"Fourteen colonists," Spock said, "And six crewmen on board, including Ensign Tyler."

Kirk rubbed his eyes tiredly. _How many Ensign Tylers are worth Jim Kirk's experience?_

No. That was the wrong question. Ensign Tyler knew his duty. They all did, in fact. And the colonists hadn't chosen what the Talosians had done to them, in fact many of them only existed at all because of the decisions forced on their parents by the aliens' influence.

And the hand behind that influence was now a rapidly-expanding fireball that was slowly consuming one of the system's outer gas giants on the way to transforming that planet into an incredibly short-lived star. The hand that had struck without warning and without mercy, condescending to appear only to murder the witnesses to its crimes...

"Witnesses..." Kirk sat up straighter, "We still have the Keeper and his friends on board, don't we?"

"As well as one Talosian female that attempted to infiltrate the ship, yes."

"Where is he? In the brig?"

Spock nodded.

Kirk smiled again, "I suppose you've probably had your fill of this planet for a while, but there's one more thing I think we should do before we leave."


	17. Chapter 17

**MATERIAL WITNESS**

Talos-IV, Standard Orbit  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.47

\- 1430 hours -

Captain Kirk had gotten used to seeing the Keeper on the other side of a transparency, but something about the change of context made this entire situation seem surreal. Perhaps it was the fact that it was the Keeper, and not Kirk, that was locked away in a tiny cell against his will. Perhaps it was the fact that the transparency that divided them was a phased-matter construct of transparent aluminum that was only as substantial as the brig had power.

It was probably the sudden suspension of the Keeper's power of illusion, and the fact that Kirk could no longer be compelled to see how the Keeper imagined himself to be. He was smaller, thinner, dirtier and altogether more crumpled and awkward-looking than Kirk had ever seen him before, with a slouching depressed posture and a concave abdomen that made him seem as if he was constantly about to collapse in on himself. His one good eye was cloudy with grey mucus and was beginning to turn yellow around the corners. His claws were chipped and cracked from where he'd accidentally bitten them during many an imaginary meal.

In their previous encounters, Kirk had made himself feel rage or fear or suspicion in the Keeper's presence, but this was the first time he had ever felt pity.

"Captain Kirk," the Keeper said as he stepped up to his cell.

"Hello, Keeper," Kirk answered in kind, "We've _got_ to stop meeting like this."

"You are to be congratulated on your subterfuge, Captain. At no point on the surface did I suspect you were planning to exact your revenge in such a fashion. You have proven more adaptable than I ever thought possible."

"Oh, I'm just getting _started_. You went to a lot of trouble to convince me to leave this planet and make sure I never looked back... What is your real name, anyway?"

" _Keeper_ is my name. It is how I am known in my world. I have not seen my companions in some time... I assume your doctors are dissecting them as we speak?"

"You don't need to concern yourself with them. It's _you_ I'm here to talk to." Kirk glanced back at the security technician at the desk behind him. The technician gave him a thumbs-up. "Did the Columbia really crash on Talos-IV or was that just an illusion too?"

"As you know perfectly well, Captain Kirk, the Columbia's crash was genuine. Your experiences with the survivors, however, was an illusion we planted in your mind."

Kirk glanced at the technician again. He gave a thumbs up, then a thumbs down. Kirk smiled and moved on, "And you had us imprisoned in the pyramid under the colony site."

"Of course. You knew that already."

"I'll tell you what I _don't_ know. I think your people were hiding something down there and I want to know what it was. Mister Spock thinks it had something to do with Section Thirty One."

The Keeper stared at him blankly, "I do not understand that reference."

Kirk glanced at the technician, who gave him another thumbs-up. "Have you been doing business with other humans?"

"We dealt with the Columbia survivors when they first crashed. We have had no other contact with your Federation prior to your arrival."

"What about the _First_ Federation?"

The Keeper frowned, "I do not understand that reference either."

"We've confirmed your telepathy isn't a natural ability. It's something provided by a network of microscopic machines that pervades your atmosphere. We've seen that kind of technology before."

"Ah," the Keeper clicked his mandibles in self-satisfaction, "The companion."

"Companion?"

"It is what you would call a distributed machine. It stores the archives of our collective memories, and the memories of past generations. Through the Companion, we can commune with their memories and re-live their lives and experiences. It is how we connect with one another, with our ancestors, and with ourselves."

"And the Companion was given to you by the First Federation?"

"No. It was given to us generations ago, by a race your people know as the Anu'Anshee. They call themselves Preservers."

"Why would these so-called Preservers give you that kind of technology? Didn't they realize what kind of chaos that would cause in your society?"

The Keeper clicked his mandibles again, an expression of puzzlement. "Chaos, Captain? Our society has never been stronger. We are prospering to a greater extent than-"

"Yeah, right. Just keep telling yourself that." Kirk sighed and moved on, "What happened to the survivors of the Columbia crash?"

"Their injuries were too severe for us to treat them effectively. As you may have noticed from your time on the surface, our ability to affect reality is diminished by our propensity for illusion. I _will_ say that the survivors lived in relative comfort and happiness until they succumbed to their injuries in the weeks after the crash."

"What about Vina?"

"The female called Divina Gonzales died shortly after the crash. She, too, is an illusion we pl-"

"Why do you lie to me every time we talk about the survivors?"

Keeper looked puzzled, "You still believe your experiences were genuine?"

"Vina beamed aboard the ship _with_ us. Don't you remember?"

"Vina did not beam aboard this ship. She chose to remain behind, after we showed you her true appearance. It was necessary to convince you her desire to stay was an honest one."

"The hell are you-" Kirk squinted at the Keeper, then glanced back at the security man who gave him a very confused thumbs up. "Keeper... like, ten seconds ago, you told me Vina was an _illusion._ "

The Keeper shuffled his feet in a little crablike dance, then answered, "The female... Vina... Is merely an illusion we planted in your mind, exploiting your limited intelligence for our own ends."

Again Kirk glanced at the security man and again he gave a thumbs up, this time accompanied with a shrug. The verifier scanner built into the wall of the cell had been scanning the Keeper's autonomic system for the past several minutes, reading his reactions to get a baseline for truth and falsehood; it was clear the Keeper believed what he was saying, even when what he was saying was self-contradictory.

The problem was already self-evident. The Keeper _himself_ didn't know which parts of his story were fictional. "Vina's on on the surface now helping the colonists build their new home," Kirk said, "She told us all about your slave operation, how you forced those people to build things for you just like the women of your planet used to do. And right now, Lieutenant Uhura is..." he hesitated as an idea occurred to him. If the Keeper didn't know what parts of his story were fictional, threatening him would simply cause him to retreat deeper into his self-serving fantasies, where his problems didn't exist and his plans always worked the way he wanted them to. The only way to coax the Keeper out of his prison of self-delusion was, ironically, to delude him more than ever. "Lieutenant Uhura is in your menagerie," Kirk said, "Turning that place inside out. Whatever you people were hiding from us, it's just a matter of time before we find it."

"If you know so much about us, Captain Kirk, this interrogation would seem to be a waste of time for both of us."

Kirk shrugged, "It's what you're _not_ telling me that's revealing. I know you're hiding something, and you've just confirmed it in your own weird way." Kirk stepped closer to the transparency and lowered his voice, "If you don't come clean with me and tell me what I need to know, I'll have to take drastic measures to make sure your people never threaten the Federation again."

The Keeper pushed his eyestalks further apart, "We are no threat to _you_ , Kirk. We have no star travel and little technology..."

"How do I know that? How do I know you didn't lure Columbia into orbit with an illusion and then shoot it down with your weapons? How do I know you're not using your power of illusion to condition the survivors and their children as sleeper agents to infiltrate the Federation?"

It was the look on the Keeper's face that answered Kirk's question to his satisfaction; he had been with the Keeper long enough to read his expressions even when his emotions weren't bleeding through over the mental link he'd established, and in this instant - eye stalks pulled down close to his head, jaw slightly retracted, claws pulled against his abdomen - he knew the Keeper's expression was one of absolute _dread_.

"So _that's_ your little game." Kirk smiled, "I thought so. Thank you, Keeper. You've made my decision much easier." He turned away from the Keeper, walked just far enough away to still be heard and snapped open his communicator. "Kirk to bridge."

"Spock here, Captain."

"Mister Spock, your suspicions have been confirmed. The Talosians _are_ attempting to infiltrate the Federation."

"Has the Keeper been cooperative in revealing the methodology of this infiltration?"

Kirk looked back at the Keeper, who was started to shift his weight back and forth, increasingly anxious, "No, but I've deduced the nature of the threat from his responses."

A long pause, undoubtedly from Spock trying to figure out what else to say to make this particular conversation work the way it should. "Your orders, Captain?"

"I don't see that we have much choice, Mister Spock," Kirk said, and glanced back at the Keeper one last time, "Have the weapons bay prepare a mark six corbomite device, full strategic yield."

Lieutenant Sulu cut in, managing to sound deeply uncomfortable and unhappy with these orders. "Respectfully, Captain. Doesn't that seem like overkill? We could easily blanket their population centers with conventional weapons. There's no need to destroy the _entire planet_."

The Keeper stopped shifting his weight. Suddenly he was standing absolutely still.

Kirk sighed, "We can't take that risk, Lieutenant. I'm invoking General Order Twenty Four. The Talos planets will be demolished immediately."

"Understood, Sir..."

Almost inaudibly, the Keeper said in the softest of clicks, "Captain Kirk..."

"We are too close to the planet to safely deploy a corbomite device," Spock added, "We will have to move to a much higher orbit to avoid the blast radius."

"Do it quickly, Spock. I want to be underway within the hour."

"Captain Kirk," the Keeper said louder, desperation clearly leaching into his translated voice.

Kirk glanced back at him as if he had sneezed.

"Captain, the Talosian race is _not_ a threat to the Federation!"

"Your actions up to this point have proven otherwise."

The Keeper lurched forward, pressing both of his hands against the transparency as if he was trying to push through it. "I _promise_ you, we are not a threat to you!"

"You're a race of liars, Keeper. You even lie to _yourselves_."

"I am not deceiving you, Captain! This... this is _not_ an illusion! We meant no harm to the Federation, we were only doing as we were told!"

"Passing blame onto someone else now?" Kirk grinned and started to leave the birg, "I don't have time for this..."

"Please believe me, Captain!"

Kirk didn't even look back this time. "Why should I?"

"I have proof!"

"Sure you do..."

"Speak to our contact within your Federal sunfleet. The one the colonists call the Magistrate. He will confirm everything."

Kirk paused at the security door and made a show of thinking it over. Then he closed his communicator lid and turned around slowly. "Give me a name."

The Keeper's expression shifted. Desperation now mixed with anxiety, the visible sign that he was about to do something he knew he should not be doing. "He calls himself Garth of Izar. We last contacted him three days ago, after your crew's first assault on our world."

Kirk felt the hair on the back of his neck stand at attention. The cautious maneuvering, the conservative tactics, the tragic and ultimately fatal target fixation... it made sense. "Captian Lloyd Garth, savior of Izar, hero of the Battle of Axanar."

"I know nothing of the man except for his name and demands. And also our assumption that his ship would arrive quickly enough to drive the Enterprise out of the system if not destroy it outright. Clearly we over-estimated..."

"Tell me about this ship of his. You've seen it?"

"We have not seen it, but we know of it. It is called _USS Victory_. Garth of Izar referred to it as a 'Battleship.'"

"How did you get yourself mixed up with this individual?"

"An Earth vessel came here years ago investigating Columbia's crash. When their commander encountered us, the first thing they did was... was..." his brow furrowed and suddenly he found himself at a loss to continue.

"Was what? What did they do?"

"I don't remember."

"How could you not remember something like that?"

The Keeper either didn't hear the question or didn't understand it, "An arrangement was made... Must have been made... I might have made it myself. I don't know... This is strange..." he looked around his cell for a moment, then sighed, "I cannot remember. Our past is... dynamic... changed too much... We were, I believe, eventually placed in contact with Captain Garth through an intermediary. I have not chosen to remember how or when."

Kirk grinned as he finally realized what he was getting at. "You're so used to lying about everything that you don't even remember how to tell the _truth_."

"You mock our condition, Kirk, but you see before you a race that is struggling to prevent its own extinction. Your Sunfleet visitors offered us a simple exchange: you would allow us the use of the survivors for our own purposes, and in return, we would employ our unique abilities in the service of your Sunfleet."

He felt his skin crawling around his skull as he readied himself for the answer to his next question, "What kind of 'services' do you provide to Starfleet?"

"You have firsthand experience with how we condition our captives."

"Wrong thinking is punished," Kirk echoed the Keeper, "Right thinking is quickly rewarded."

"Precisely. Over several years, a Sunfleet vessel delivered groups of individuals into our custody, which we then reconditioned to your specifications and delivered them to Garth of Izar when the work was completed. We also exported some of the more rebellious members of the Columbia workforce, under the guise of execution or natural death. Divina Hernandez was one such individual intended for export."

"So you're using your powers of manipulation to condition these people... question is, what were you conditioning them to _do_?"

The Keeper looked down at his feet and exhaled slowly. "Captain Kirk... Please understand. We have suspected from the beginning that your government would not sanction the kind of arrangement that was offered to us. We have acted out of desperation, for the preservation of our way of life. We are not criminals, Kirk. We are-"

"What," Kirk asked slowly, "Were you conditioning them to _do_?"

He was resigned to his fate now, come what may. With a calm Kirk had not seen in him since their first meeting, the little crab creature glared into him and put his fate in his hands. "Are you familiar with a planet called... _Praxis_?"

.

Talos-IV, Southern Hemisphere  
Bo'Shan Mountain Pass  
Stardate 2261.44

\- 1430 hours -  
"You're _sure_ this is what you want?" Doctor Marcus asked, letting the soft crunch of the alien moss beneath her boots punctuate her question. The concern in her voice was genuine, even if the nature of the question wasn't. Marcus didn't need to be a telepath to see how _unhappy_ Vina was with his decision.

And Vina didn't have to be a telepath for the expression on her face to confirm it. She was glaring into what should have been the night sky, watching the blazing fireball of the still-burning seventh planet slowly rise over the horizon. "We took a vote," she said stiffly, "And that's what we decided."

"You don't _have_ to stay with the others, though. We can take you wherever you want."

"Where would I go?" Vina asked, putting her hands on her hips. She wasn't looking at Marcus anymore, but out at the expanse of the Bo'Shan valley, its vast mossy fields, rolling hills and small, scuttling animals, like miniature versions of the Talosians themselves. I don't remember much from my old life. And a lot of what I _do_ remember is fabricated."

"The Vulcans have techniques that can help erase false memories or recover repressed ones..."

"And replace them with what, exactly? I don't remember anything about my life before I came to this planet. _None_ of us remember that anymore. You know what I _do_ remember?" Vina sighed and turned to her sadly, "I have seven children, Carol. They were all born right here on Talos-IV. I raised each of them, I nursed them, I watched them grow into smiling young adults. And one after another, I watched them die. Executed by the Magistrate's thugs or made to take their own lives in the Keeper's sick games. And finally Ricca, the daughter I had almost forgotten existed, smashed to pieces in that goddamn shuttle crash. _Seven children_. All dead."

"And you feel like you have to stay here to honor their memories? Build a legacy for them?"

"No, Carol. I have to stay here because my medical records from the New Horizons corporation say I had a hysterectomy in 2231 and I am medically incapable of having children." Vina turned and looked at her, emptiness in her eyes. "I have to stay here because none of the experiences that make me the person I am today ever _really_ happened. I have to stay here because this is the only place in the universe where the person who calls herself Vina Hernandez truly even exists."

Doctor Marcus was in no position to argue. The relief teams down at the bottom of the hill had just finished setting up the temporary shelters for the colonists who'd elected to stay, and she fully expected the seven who'd voted to leave would change their votes by nightfall. She couldn't agree with their decision, but she could understand it all the same. Rehabilitation would be a long and painful process of sorting false memories from real ones, and some of those false memories were certainly things they clung to for comfort when things were at their darkest. These people were broken inside, but they were broken in a special way that only they, as a group, could understand, and they didn't want to share that with the outside universe.

Marcus wished for a better ending to these people's story. The fact that there wasn't one made her itch inside.

Her communicator was beeping again. Marcus snapped it open and answered with a curt, "Ma'am."

"Carol," Lieutenant Uhura said, "I see you on top of the hill. Do you see Anansi anywhere?"

Hearing this, Vina batted her on the shoulder and pointed further down the hill. The large black-shelled female that had only days ago made an impromptu visit to the bridge of the Enterprise was squatting on a large flake of rock just above the vaulted door that opened to the underground Bo'Shan complex. She wasn't hiding, exactly, just perched and staying out of the way while the aliens worked around her. "She's sitting on top of the tunnel entrance," Marcus said, "Waiting for _you_ , I suppose. The jamming signal is still strong from where I'm standing."

"Copy that. On my way. If you're all finished on your end, you should beam back to the ship."

"I am, and I will. Marcus out." She watched now as Lieutenant Uhura began climbing up the slope to meet the female, and took one last look at the Bo'Shan valley and the shelters being built here. "You know I don't feel right about leaving you people here. I think you're going to end up regretting it, and we won't be there to help you next time."

"We've survived here almost three decades. I think we'll be okay. Besides, the Bo'Shan tribes aren't slavers. If anything, they'll just trick us into working a little harder for our collective survival. Who knows, maybe we'll become the workforce the Keeper always wanted?"

"And you're okay with that? Becoming a race of slaves to a bunch of manipulative aliens?"

"It certainly beats the alternative."

"I hope you're right." Marcus sighed, then snapped open her communicator and signaled the Enterprise one last time. "One to beam up. Take care, Vina."

Further down the slope, Uhura heard the tumbling chime as the transporter beam carried Doctor Marcus away to oblivion. Beneath that, she heard a series of dull clicks and gutturals from the Talosian female on top of the entrance and the softer, staticky response that came from the handheld radio she was talking into. Conferring with the other clan leaders again, Uhura realized, and her translator gleaned a few details that told her it was mostly unimportant diplomatic issues; washing schedules, meeting times, harvest times, and so on. Disabling the nanites in this valley had made those kinds of things important for the first time in decades and the female clan leaders were doing a lot of talking amongst themselves, trying to remember how to operate like a society again instead of the hearty bands of survivalists they had been reduced to until now.

The Talosian language was relatively easy to translate, but proper nouns like names and places didn't translate so neatly without the benefit of their telepathic influence to translate the words into feelings and then back into equivalent words those feelings invoked. And even then, there was the problem that different cultures interpreted Talosian signals in slightly different ways and so the translation wasn't always totally consistent.

In the end, Uhura decided to call the female 'Anansi.' Not for any particular reason except that the black-shelled Talosian superficially resembled a spider when you looked at her the right way, not to mention her propensity for mischief and misdirection. The female seemed to like the name, although it wasn't clear if she understood the subtext of it.

There were, on the other hand, quite a few other things Anansi understood surprisingly well. "Lieutenant Uhura," Anansi said, suddenly breaking away from her conversation as she saw Uhura climbing up towards her, "Won't you get in trouble for doing this? I understand your people's non-interference directive is very strict."

Uhura looked back down from the vaulted door that lead down into the Talosian fortress, looking over the work still underway at the former Bo'Shan Trading Post, former Bo'Shan resistance base, former Bo'Shan military complex. The rotting decomposing tents and their squalid contents had already been swept away by work crews in shuttlecraft, corpses carted away for disposal. A sheetmetal building farther up the pass had been erected and converted into a medical clinic and Doctor McCoy had donated - with a considerable amount of reluctance - a scan of his medical expertise to one of the Talosian amplifiers. Where those tents formerly stood, plastic and cermet huts were being erected as residential homes for the survivors, and a few larger tents were being built as communal homes for the females and the hatchlings. Farther down the slope were the shelters for the colonists, the new alien residents that would be some of Anansi's first neighbors.

It looked to Uhura like an ordinary humanitarian relief mission, but she knew that looks were often deceiving. This was the seed of a _colony_ they were building, in violation of every regulation in the book. "Technically," she said, gamely, "Starfleet has _already_ interfered with your culture by trading with those slavers in U'Shul. We can chalk this up to humanitarian aid and diplomatic reparations. The home office will love it. Never mind that you people didn't actually _ask_ us for help..."

Anansi clicked her mandibles and jumped down from the top of the door, landing on the rocks below Uhura. It was the way of the females, Uhura noticed, but not the males; Anansi preferred solid ground beneath her feet, where the males usually stuck to the softer soil where their claws could dig in a little deeper. "'Asking' is not our way," said the female in the little electronic voice of the translator now attached to the shell on her back, "I suppose it's because none of our kind ever refused an order before the Anu'Anshee gave us the nanites. I think that's something we should all work on together. Respecting each other's will and rights more consistently. Oh, speaking of the swarm, I don't know that I've thanked your people for eliminating it from the valley..."

"We didn't _eliminate_ it. The phases pulse we fired this morning only disabled the nanites near the surface. Any underground spaces or thick forest areas will still be infested. Speaking of which..." Uhura suddenly remembering the reason she'd asked Anansi to meet her up in the hill in the first place. "This device," she said, handing the Talosian the modified tricorder, "Has been pre-programmed to detect and neutralize the nanite swarms. If it detects any, it will give you this indicator," she demonstrated, keying the tricorder's demo mode to show the indicator light, "And you press this button to create an electromagnetic pulse that should kill them instantly. Keep in mind, it only has a range of about twenty meters, and we also don't know where the nanites come from, whether they're self-replicating or if there's a machine of some kind that makes them."

Anansi took the tricorder in hand and then tapped her feet in surprise, "It fits my claw!"

"We modified the case to make it easier to hold for you."

"That is very thoughtful. Thank you, Lieutenant."

Uhura smiled. "Don't thank me. We're giving you the means to reduce the males of your species to mindless slaves with no will of their own..."

"You've met the males of our species. They're either slaves to us or they're slaves to their own fantasies. As for being mindless, that's hardly _our_ fault."

"Have you considered the possibility," Uhura said slowly, "That the males asked the Anu'Anshee for help because your kind were mistreating them? Maybe even abusing them unnecessarily?"

Ananshi tapped her back legs, the Talosian equivalent of a shrug, "That wouldn't surprised me in the least. If I remember my history, it was the savage global wars and the resulting nuclear winter that lead the Preservers to intervene in the first place. They must have thought they were doing the males a favor."

"But you disagree?" Uhura asked.

"Their intervention turned what should have been a violent period of self-discovery into a long and painful episode of self-delusion. I don't know much about the Preservers, but it seems like their number one hobby is to wander around the galaxy trying to solve everyone else's problems."

"You can't fault them for trying."

"Yes I _can_. With generations of global war, we might have shocked ourselves into sanity and committed our intellect to a saner path. Instead, our entire civilization is dying a slow grim death right now _because_ of their assistance. They tried to help us without understanding the situation and in the end they made things far worse."

"Our non-interference directive," Uhura said, "Is Starfleet's First General Order. It simply states that Starfleet will not interfere with the natural development of an alien civilization. We can help, we can heal, we can mend bridges and build roads, but we do not guide societies and we do not build nations."

Anansi clicked her mandibles and said, "The Preservers _do._ "

"Well if I ever meet them," Uhura said, "I'll make sure to ask them _why_."

"Don't keep me in suspense. I'm curious myself."

Uhura frowned, "Don't take this the wrong way, but I wasn't planning on ever coming back to this planet. Least of all to see _you_. I can understand why you took the actions that you did, but the fact is you _killed_ one of my colleagues."

"I did? When? How?"

"In the tunnels. When you fired that hand laser at Doctor Danar."

"She was killed with a _laser_?" Anansi tapped her feet, lost in thought for a moment. "It couldn't have been me."

"You impersonated her and boarded the Enterprise-"

"Because something in the tunnel killed her. I never got a look at what it was. I didn't even know it was a laser until just a second ago."

"Anansi, we clearly saw you in that tunnel firing that hand laser at us. Please do _not_ insult my intelligence by-"

"If I had killed your friend in order to impersonate her, I certainly wouldn't have let you _remember_ it. The only reason I used her image was because I didn't think you'd noticed she was dead. Then I heard you report it to your ship, so I changed images after we beamed aboard. Besides, with everything you've seen of our people, you honestly think any of _us_ have directed energy weapons?"

In all honesty, it was a question Uhura had briefly grappled with in the past. She'd chalked it up to a small but unimportant mystery, but if even Anansi was pointing it out... "If it wasn't you, then who _was_ it?"

"I don't know, but it wasn't one of _my_ people. I don't know about any of the other regions, but the Bo'Shan Fortress was the only tribe for a hundred kilometers that even had reliable electricity _._ Until you decided to help us, our tribe didn't even have working radios."

"So the thing that fired at us was just... what? Blending in?" Uhura felt a chill run down her spine, "That would mean there's something else on this plant we haven't seen yet."

"There are probably _many_ things on this planet you haven't seen yet," Anansi said, "Planets are _big_ like that."

Uhura shifted her weight unsteadily, replaying Danar's death in her mind. Now that she thought about it, there _was_ something off about that incident. The female carrying the hand laser had seemed to appear out of nowhere, and when Sulu had fired his phaser into it his pulses had passed through as if it was just shadow. When the hand laser exploded, she had vanished like a puff of smoke, as if her body was totally insubstantial...

As if the _nanites_ had become a solid thing and attacked them directly. They had acted with purpose, with deliberation, and most importantly, _without the females' direct knowledge._ "I have a feeling that there's something more to this."

"There probably is," said Anansi. And then, "Do you _really_ want to stay here and find out?"

It was almost a rhetorical question. Uhura snapped open her communicator and signaled Enterprise's channel. "Uhura to Doctor McCoy. Are you all set over there?"

"Just finishing, Nyota. And the field engineers are beaming back now. We're about ready to pack it in."

"Copy that." She lowered the communicator for a moment and smiled at Anansi, "You know, those colonists have been through a lot of hardship. You _will_ try to do right by them, won't you?"

"We'll do what we do best. Surround them with beautiful things and pleasant sensations as a reward for their hard work."

Uhura frowned, "You're going to go on manipulating them just like those slavers."

"We'll _take care_ of them, Nyota," Anansi said, "And they'll take care of us. And maybe, in our own way, we can all learn to live together in peace. I suppose something like that doesn't mean much to your kind, but-"

"No, Anansi. It means _everything_ to me." She raised the communicator again, "Uhura to Enterprise. One to beam up."


	18. Chapter 18 (Final)

**THE COLD WARRIORS**

Interstellar Space, On Route to Starbase 11  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.52 - Captain's Log

 _Have departed Talos Star Group, on route to specified coordinates as ordered. We've planned a twenty-four hour layover to resettle Talos colonists and survivors rescued from captivity. Location of Talos-IV colonist resettlements to remain confidential until further notice._

 _Latest bulletins suggest the Romulan offensive on Kronos has stalled, with indications of new combat actions near the outlying colonies supporting the defenders. Federation News Service is calling it the Siege of Kronos. Suffice to say, we are keeping apprised of the situation._

 _Attached: [Final report on operation at Talos-IV ]_

 _Command Summary: The Talosian civilization is in a state of accelerated decline due to widespred overuse of psionic amplifiers that severely degrade their ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Mister Spock estimates that without coordinated widespread intervention, the referenced sentient species will be effectively extinct within the next five to ten years. In anticipation of the designation of this planet as home to a Category Four Civilization, I endorse that recommendation wholeheartedly, with the additional recommendation that even in the event of their extinction, no Federation vessel should ever visit Talos-IV again. Additional notes include the events leading to the destruction of the planet Talos-VII and the destruction of an unidentified Dreadnought-class starship, believed to be USS Victory, in atmosphere of said planet. Whereabouts of Dreadnought USS Valiant are still undetermined._

 _End of Log_

.

USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.52 - Captain's Personal Log

 _He's dead._

 _Garth of Izar. Hero of the Battle of Axanar. Greatest tactical mind Starfleet ever produced._

 _The man's maneuvers are required reading at the academy._

 _And_ I _killed him._

 _The scary thing is, I don't even regret it. The crazy bastard tried to blow up a town just to cover up his own crimes and then tried to destroy the Enterprise to make sure there were no witness. This makes the second time in two years that Section Thirty One has tried to have me killed, and this time they sent a titan like Lloyd Garth to do their dirty work. All that tactical genius, and the man falls for a Cochrane Deceleration? I hope he rots in hell._

 _The bigger problem is the Klingon situation. I spent most of my life hearing about how the Klingons are the Federation's mortal enemy. About how they annihilated the Xyrillians for colonizing their space, about how they hunt Suliban for sport in the streets of Hakor. About how their warriors rampage across their protected space, raping and pillaging as they please. All my life hearing this: the Klingons are coming, the Klingons are coming, keep your phaser handy, there's Klingons out there. And then I think about people like Alex Marcus and Lloyd Garth and Khan Noonien Singh..._

 _There are a lot of different people involved in this war, but it's a war with only two sides. On one side, there's Starfleet, and the Federation, and everyone who wants to work for the future. On the other side, there's Section Thirty One and the Tal'Shiar and everyone who stands to loose from peace. This war's been going on for a very long time, longer than anyone would ever believe. It's time that_ our _side started fighting back._

.

\- 0830 hours -  
"The Klingons said they did it on purpose," Uhura said, looking at Kirk in disbelief, "That's what all the news reports said. That Praxis was _deliberately_ exploded as part of a new burst of military spending. Nobody believes that of course, we all just assumed it was a massive industrial accident."

"They _would_ claim responsibility," Kirk said, "If they admit it was an accident, it could be a sign of weakness. But if the Empire knew it was an act of _sabotage_ , it would be all-out war."

"I'm not sure I believe this," Lieutenant Scott grumbled, "You're saying Federation operatives _engineered_ the destruction of Praxis?"

"According to the Keeper, they only triggered it. But the chain reaction had to be set up first. Failsafes disabled, certain equipment inspections rescheduled at just the right time. Maybe a thousand things would have to go wrong at the same time for Praxis to have that kind of disaster. That's where the Talosians come in."

Spock nodded at this, looking at the PADD on the table in front of him, "The amplifier from Bo'Shan contains verifiable indexes to four hundred and eighty seven individuals, likely powerplant employees and mining officials. The Watcher's memory is selective at best, but his description of them is consistent with Klingon and Nausican phenotypes. It would appear they were programmed to sabotage the power network in very specific ways and then have no recollection of having done so afterwards."

"And nothing to trace it back to the Federation," Kirk said, "The saboteurs had no idea what was going on. Even _if_ they were caught, there's nothing to link them to the Federation in any way."

"This changes things, doesn't it?" Sulu asked, "Praxis was their key energy production facility. Seventy percent of their domestic power consumption and ninety percent of their dilithium came from that moon."

"And without Praxis, the Empire's just a paper tiger. To say nothing of the environmental damage to Kronos itself. It's hard to say how bad they had it, but after Praxis the Empire can never seriously threaten the Federation again."

Uhura looked up suddenly, "And now the Romulan invasion..."

Kirk nodded, "It's definitely not a coincidence. And I don't think the Romulans are just being clever either. I think that Section Thirty One wants to make sure the Empire never has a chance to recover. They might even be directly _supporting_ the invasion."

"Federation citizens supporting Romulans?" Sulu looked mortified, "That's just crazy."

Spock and Uhura traded a long, knowing glance. "There _is_ a certain type of person who would find that cooperation useful."

"Great minds think alike," Kirk said, "So do sociopaths."

McCoy sat up at his end of the table, clearing his throat, "Sorry to break up this moralistic pity party, but aren't we looking at this the wrong way? I mean, the Klingon Empire is a military dictatorship supported by conquest and slave labor. They _brutalize_ the planets they conquer. They've exterminated whole civilizations just to prove that they _can._ Maybe destroying Praxis isn't morally or legally acceptable, but isn't the Federation that much safer without the marauding horde massing on our doorstep?"

Lieutenant Scott nodded in agreement, "You have to consider how many lives were saved by demolishing that moon. Thousands of Starfleet officers who won't have to die in a pointless war, tens of thousands on the disputed planets..."

"Federation lives... Starfleet lives..." Doctor Marcus hadn't said a word until now, quiet as a mouse in a corner of the table between Chekov and Spock, "Do _Klingon_ lives matter?"

The question stirred all of them in different ways. All of them shifted uncomfortably, some at the implication that they didn't, and some at the implication that they should. "Of course they matter," McCoy said, "But..."

"More than our security?" Marcus asked, "More than Federation interests? More than Federation supremacy? More, perhaps, than establishing regional dominance over the Klingons and even the Romulan Empire?"

Sulu asked, "Why should _Klingon_ lives matter more than the Federation's security?"

"For the same reason Federation lives matter more than Klingon security," Marcus said, "We can afford to be secure without putting _their_ lives at risk, and the same goes for them and anyone else we might be competing with. Now let me ask you this: how many people were on Praxis when it exploded? How many people on Kronos have died from the debris of that moon raining down out of orbit? How many are dying just from exposure to the elements, from starvation, from not having enough power to run the hospitals properly?"

"And that's all water under the bridge right now," Kirk said, nodding, "The real question is this: how many _billions_ of people are dying right now because Section Thirty One made this invasion possible?"

McCoy took a deep breath and exhaled through his nose, like he was battling a sharp chest pain.

Scott leaned forward on his elbows, propping his chin on top of his thumbs, staring off into other times and other places.

"It's not just a faceless mass out there," Kirk went on, "Those are _people_. People with names and faces. People with mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. People with careers and dreams. People who reminisce about yesterday and look forward to tomorrow. People who are dying by the _billions_ right now because of what Section Thirty One did to them. Gentlemen, I am no mood to split hairs about whether the ends justifies the means. There are people _suffering_ right now because of this. And I've called this meeting because it's past time we did something about it."

Kirk's senior officers sat up a little bit straighter, all eyes focussed on him now. Even Scott lost the far-away look in his eyes and focussed back on the here-and-now.

"Section Thirty One is a _problem_ ," Kirk said, "Not just to us specifically, although the fact that this is the _second_ time they've come gunning for us probably isn't a coincidence. I mean that they're a problem for the entire Federation. They see us being surrounded by extraordinary threats that require extraordinary measures to counteract. They think of themselves as the Federation's silent protectors. But they're not. They're just scared angry people who don't have the backbone to follow their own principles."

McCoy frowned, "We bend the rules often enough on this ship. Suppose sometimes we have to sacrifice our principles in order to protect them?"

"Then our principles are flawed. Simple as that."

"There's _no way_ it's that simple! We believe in democracy but we don't take a vote on course corrections!"

"No. What we _do_ is we follow the orders of our democratically elected leaders and the laws they pass as part of their function in the Federation government and United Earth. Because we believe in Earth, we believe in the Federation, and we're out here in space, exploring new worlds and seeking out new life and new civilizations because we believe the thing we represent is worth enriching, worth protecting, and most of all, worth _sharing_ with the rest of the universe. How can we be all of that _and_ be people who set up entire civilizations to get glassed by our sworn enemies?"

" _We_ didn't do that," Sulu said, drumming his fingers on the table, "Section Thirty One did. They don't represent the Federation, _we_ do."

"But they used Federation resources to do it," Chekov said, "And they're still doing it now. They claim to act on our behalf."

"And if we stand around and do nothing, we're just enabling them," Kirk went on, "I say screw that. Section Thirty One is a problem, we're going to _solve_ it."

"Us?" McCoy said, gesturing around the table, "How are _we_ supposed to do that?"

Kirk's skin turned to cast iron now. They had finally arrived at the purpose of this meeting. "Now hear this: effective immediately, every one of you have standing orders to gather information about the operations and assets of Section Thirty One. Mister Spock has data from the Talosian amplifier that we can use to generate some leads. All of you have your own personal resources, connections, friends, acquaintances. I want you to call in every favor, twist every arm, gather up any information you can. Keep this quiet, and keep it under the table. The people we're after like to hide in plain sight, and if they realize we're after them, we'll get a knife in the back as sure as Bones is crabby."

McCoy flinched and growled, "Hey!"

"Which, I think, is where I come in," Doctor Marcus said, already drawing their collective eyes, "As most of you know, my father was the most public face of Section Thirty One, and his demise brought the organization into the limelight. That connection makes me persona non grata among Thirty One's agents, which basically eliminates any access I might have had. On the other hand, they don't consider me _compromised,_ or else this operation on Talos-IV would have been sanitized long before we got there."

"You have the inside scoop on Section Thirty One?" Uhura asked.

"My father gave me access to every project he oversaw. He even brought me in as a consultant for some of them. I know, for example, that every major starbase has a safehouse used by Section Thirty One operatives, and I know how to find them. There are also a few support stations on remote planets near Klingon space. New Pacifica, Drozana Three, Gamma Hydra Four, to name a few. Most of these are equipped with long-range transwarp beaming relays, and certainly other interesting equipment."

Spock asked, "Would these assets still be operational after their disavowal by Starfleet?"

"Those assets are Thirty One's _foundation_. We weren't _part_ of Starfleet so much as... well, _borrowing_ it."

"The word you're looking for is 'infiltrating,'" Kirk said sharply, "Which sort of goes to my original point."

"I realize that, Sir," Marcus said, nodding, "In which case, you can consider me a defector."

Kirk grinned at her, "Happy to. But here's the real question I think we need answering. Does Section Thirty One operate as a shadowy network of faceless informants, or is there some kind of infrastructure we can attack?"

"Neither and both," Marcus said, "They're split up into task forces that each focus on a specific objective. Each task force is made up of two or more cells, an each cell has multiple operatives that act independently. Even then, most of Thirty One's work is done by unwitting proxies, so you'll rarely find more than one or two operatives in any one place."

Kirk nodded, "They manipulate other people into doing their dirtywork."

"Just like the Admiral convinced you to charge into the neutral zone to kill Khan," Marcus nodded, "Nearly starting a war in the process. So you get the idea: most of Thirty One's work involves theatrics and misdirection, and most of their physical assets are just storehouses for their props. We can shut them down one by one, and Thirty One will just rebuild them somewhere else."

Spock said, "Then our targets must be the facilitators who support the field operations."

"That's a start, but we also have to consider the consequences of their public exposure. Until now, they could embed themselves in Starfleet or the United Earth Military and piggyback on our existing infrastructure. Now they have a dreadnought and at least two heavy cruisers, probably acting as a mobile command center. This is a cancer we're hunting, and now it's metastasized and more aggressive than ever. The only way we can fight this is if we find a way to destroy it faster than it can regenerate, even if that means cutting out healthy tissue the malignancy has attached to."

Doctor McCoy sat up suddenly, "Actually, that's an old cliche. The best way to fight cancer is with medical nanites programmed to recognize cancer cells and attack them directly. That's the modern way to do it, anyway. There's also immunostimulants that trick the body into destroying its own cancer cells, but that's a pretty painful way of-"

"You know what? I like your first option better." Kirk clasped his hands on the table, "Uhura, I want you send a series of discrete communiques. Mark them for commanding officers of the starships Hornet, Yorktown and Saratoga."

"Add the Lexington," Spock added, "She's just completed her shakedown cruise. Captain Robert Wesley in command."

"I know Bob Wesley. He's a 'speak softly and carry a big stick' kind of guy. I think he'll be down too."

"What am I telling them?" Uhura asked, "And how do I tell it to them while still being discrete?"

"Tell them to remember the good times at Pike's Peak and give them coordinates for..." he thought about it for a moment, "The Azure Nebula. That's close enough to our patrol routes that none of them will have to deviate too far."

"Pikes Peak?" The question was in her eyes.

"The captains of those ships," Kirk said, "Morgan Lefler, John Garrovick, Jose Mendez... they all have one thing in common."

Spock didn't wait for her to ask for clarity. "They were all proteges of Admiral Pike."

"And they were all in the room with us when Pike was _killed_ ," Kirk added, "They all know too well how dangerous Section Thirty One can be. They'll support us on this for sure."

"I can also call Boyce on the Concordia," McCoy added, "And Piper's on the Challenger now. I'm sure I can get them on board."

"I'd give Lieutenant Braxxim a call," Sulu added, "I heard he's stationed on Discovery now. We _know_ he's trustworthy."

"Captain," Scott leaned forward, "You realize you're about to declare a private war against an entire organization of professional spies? That doesn't strike me as a wise thing to do."

Marcus nodded in agreement, "He _is_ right. You're basically signing up to be a James Bond villain."

Kirk thought about this, then smiled, "I like it. Let's go with that."

McCoy rolled his eyes. "Why do you have to do everything the _hard_ way?"

"No, I'm serious. Let's do the Bond Villain thing. We capture one of their operatives, put him in some kind of elaborate death trap he's sure to escape from somehow, and then gloatingly tell him our entire evil plan so that when he escapes, he goes and tells all of Section Thirty One what we're up to."

Scott came half out of his chair, "They'll come after us with everything they've got! Ninjas, battle drones, that flippin enormous dreadnought they've been hiding somewhere and god knows what else! They'll send their whole army after us and-" at the growing smirk on the Captain's face, Scott clammed up. He replayed his own outburst in his head and then his own grin matched his, "Yeah, alright then!"

"If we're really doing this," Uhura said, "We should consider the legal repercussions. We're on our own initiative to take down an entire espionage unit just because they don't like us. This could be construed as an act of _treason_."

Spock grunted thoughtfully, "I disagree. After all, Section Thirty One does not _officially_ exist. Starfleet will be just as agnostic of its demise as it was of its various atrocities."

"We're _doing_ this," Kirk said, "And we're doing it because it needs to be done. And I need to know that you're all on board with this."

Chekov tilted his head slightly, "Well, they _did_ try to kill us twice."

" _Three_ times," Sulu corrected, "If you include the torpedo thing as a separate incident."

McCoy hooted, "I totally forgot about that! They served us up to the Klingons with beans and rice."

"We're on board, Sir," Uhura said, and a round of nods from all around the table confirmed it. "Just say the word."

Kirk nodded back. "Assume internal communications are being tapped. There will be no open discussion or specific references to our 'special research project' except to and from myself or Mister Spock. We clear?" He looked around the table, meeting their glances. They were as ready as they would ever be, or at least they were pretending to be. There was nothing left to be said now. "Dismissed."

Captain Kirk's officers rose to their feet with a shared sense of solemn purpose, and Kirk could hear in his head what all of them must have been thinking. The gloves were off now and the flag was going up.

 _USS Enterprise was going to war._

.

Omega Leonis System  
Praxis Belt, Kronos Orbit  
1 Paxi, 1485

Kang knew it was just an affectation, some artistic touch of the developers who originally assembled the thing's personality matrix. He knew the Kor'Ah's onboard AI didn't actually feel emotion and wasn't capable of being excited. And yet the synthesized voice sounded positively mortified when the science sensors triggered its breaking maneuver and the system announced, "Brace for deceleration!"

He pressed his feet to the footpads of his command chair and pulled his restraints tight across his chest. It was, if anything, wishful thinking; if Kor'Ah collided with anything now, both he and the chair would be vaporized before either of them had a chance to experience any physical collisions. That thought was not exactly comforting right now, but Kang had been raised on a healthy diet of cynicism and an unhealthy lack of self-preservation instincts and now he was just along for the ride.

The viewscreen image showed the swirling orange warp tunnel effect beginning to collapse, then tapering to a point as if the universe were clenching its jaws in front of him. Then in a flash of light, the ship was back in normal space, and three billion tons of asteroid rubble were barreling towards it at a thousand meters per second.

"Aw _tits_!" He heard the screaming of his youthful pilot over the intercom as well as echoing through the compartment from somewhere behind him. The pilot house was in a raised compartment above and behind the bridge where the ship's pilot and navigators had a three hundred and sixty degree view around them, but at battle stations, when the ship seemed to be its smallest, Kang could hear the kid as if he was sitting right next to him.

And he _sounded_ as if he'd just lost bladder control. Kang couldn't really blame him.

For his credit, the little whelp managed to bank the ship hard to port and then a lateral translation to clear the patch of debris that appeared in front of them. Kor'Ah was heavy for a battle cruiser, but a skilled pilot like Torg Ha'Tok knew how to make it _dance_.

G-forces piled on, and Kang felt himself being thrown around the bridge as Torg put the ship into another series of evasive maneuvers. He was dodging through something that Kang couldn't see on the monitor, either because the angles were wrong or because the ship was just moving that fast. In a few seconds, however, the ship seemed to steady down, and Torg finally announced on the intercom, "That was close! We're clear!"

Kang hit the controls on his command chair and switched to a navigational view. A three-dimensional image of the space around his ship showed their position now as well as their relative location in orbit of the homeworld. They had emerged in sublight just inside the ever-expanding debris field that had once been Qo'mos' largest moon. Despite the near miss on arrival, most of the fragments around them were spread thinly; the closest of them were almost a hundred kilometers away, and the only pieces of debris larger than a shuttlecraft were barely inside of weapons range. Behind him, the display showed the location of the other four cruisers in his formation: the Hor'Khan, the Negh'Var, the Mek'leth and the Ha'Sith. That all five of them had arrived in one piece was not totally surprising to Kang, but it was also a welcome relief.

"Are we secure here?" Kang asked, "Any enemy presence?"

Sensor monitoring stations ringed half the room on either side of his command chair; six different "lookouts" each monitoring a different set of detection instruments and compiling their results for the tactical officer, whose station dominated the center of the room directly behind the Captain's chair. "No sign of detection," said the Gunnery Sergeant there, in that deep rumbling voice that somehow managed to sound calm even when the man it belonged to was scared out of his mind. Like now, Kang suspected, considering what they had just warped into. "I _am_ detecting scanner emissions, however," Sergeant Mogh added, "The Romulans may have noticed our deceleration maneuver."

"We expected that. It changes nothing. Do we have eyes on the target?"

Mogh started to answer this, but the question wasn't meant for him.

The ship's AI, in its function as both first officer and communications router, answered automatically, "Datalink received from Sai'et Jurai. Target location confirmed."

Kang's fists clenched automatically, his blood pumping faster. Jurai's intelligence was always accurate, so he wasn't really surprised. But Kang also knew that battles weren't decided by the quality of a warrior, but by the quality of a warrior's preparation. And his squadron was better prepared for this mission than they had been for anything in their lives. "Keep an eye out for it. Once we get a visual..."

"I have it, General!" one of the lookouts shouted from her console, "Romulan battleship, dead ahead!"

"Visual!"

Mogh put the optical track on the screen and the target vessel materialized in front of him.

Jurai had called it the Imperial Romulan Fleetship Kroy'Wen, and like most Romulan ships it was indeed painted like a giant bird of prey. Unlike most Romulan ships, however, the carrier was a _massive_ starship, easily a kilometer long and built round a huge rectangular hull that Kang understood was primarily just a support structure for the ship's huge plasma cannon.

"That's our boy," Kang said, gripping the arm rests harder. That plasma cannon was the giveaway. The barrel of it ran the entire length of the ship beginning near its main drive core and ending in a the muzzle of a terrifying-looking cannon barrel. A ship very much like this had fired its main weapon at Ty'Gokor, destroying the entire station in a single blast, even with its deflector shield at full power. And two days ago this very vessel had descended to low altitude and fired that huge cannon on the city of Qu'Vat, reducing that city - and everything within twenty kellicams of it, including its twenty six million inhabitants - to a simmering lake of molten glass.

The battleship was powerful, but it was _slow_. General Kor's raiders had managed to cripple its warp drive in yesterday's operation, and Kang's mission was to finish the job they started. The Romulans had chosen this little hiding spot because they knew it was suicide for anyone to attack them there. And Kang had chosen to attack them there because the Romulans didn't expect their enemies to rush head-first into the jaws of death.

Silly greenbloods. They never learn.

"All ships, form up," he said, clicking the control on his arm rest, "They'll definitely have defenses in the area."

Sergeant Mogh asked, "Shall I arm the disruptors?"

"Not yet. Wait until we're in firing range." Kang toggled back to tactical display. The other four cruisers had pulled into a protective box formation around the Kor'ah, passive scanners searching the sky for threats. The Romulan battleship hung in the distance like a stormcloud on the horizon: far away, but still ominously close.

"We're closing in," Mogh said, "Range, five thousand kellicams."

"Steady as she goes," Kang said, "We'll only get one shot at this..."

"Targets, Sir!" one of the lookouts shouted, "Two Romulan warbirds off the starboard bow! They're painting us!"

"Take evasive action but keep us on course!"

The four escorting cruisers shifted their formation; Negh'Var and Ha'Sith moved back, powering their deflectors to build a strong screen ahead of their fleet. Hor'Khan and Mek'Leth moved further forward and both powered their phaser cannons instead, meeting the Romulan defenders head on. The two preybirds spread their formation slightly wider and opened fire together; Hor'Khan and Mek'Leth fired back, orange Klingon phaser pulses and green Romulan plasma bolts passing each other in space.

"Four thousand kellicams!" Mogh shouted.

"Steady on course," Kang said, "Continue on impulse power..."

Hor'Khan's main phasers let off a burst of fire and one of the Romulan warbirds glittered brightly, shields flaring brightly. The return fire seemed to thicken, as if the hit had somehow made the Romulans angrier. In a few moments Kang's battlecruisers passed the two attacking ships in space; Hor'Khan and Mek'Leth both turned to keep their main batteries trained on them, coasting as the other three cruisers accelerated behind them.

Two against two would have been excellent odds under normal circumstances; a Romulan bird of war was no match for a K'tinga-class battlecruiser even on its best of days. But the circumstances of this war were far from normal, and Romulan tactics were the most abnormal of all. Kang knew that by letting themselves get separated from the others, Hor'Khan and Mek'Leth had just cut stuck their heads directly into the jaws of a beast. He also knew their commanders knew this, that they wouldn't have made that mistake without a reason.

It had happened so many times before that Kang wasn't even surprised this time, and yet somehow it still filled him with dread: where two seconds ago had been an empty tactical display showing only five ships and a distant battleship far ahead of them, Kang's display now showed dozens of photon torpedoes converging on the Hor'Khan and the Mek'Leth, swarming them from all sides. The torpedoes that didn't register on sensors until seconds before impact, that had no observable launch points and no detectable guidance systems, torpedoes that the Romulan warbirds didn't even seem to have launchers for.

"Two thousand kellicams!" Mogh said, "Almost in range!"

The trailing cruisers began to fire their point defense batteries, then began evasive maneuvers. Kang forced himself to focus on the task at hand. Torg gave a cry of alarm even as the tactical display showed that three more warbirds had now appeared off the port bow, and Negh'Var and Ha'Sith were transferring power to their phaser cannons to engage them. And more of those mystery torpedoes were beginning to appear, this time directly in Kor'Ah's path...

"One thousand kellicams!" Mogh bellowed, "Twenty seconds to firing range!"

Hor'Khan began firing off its point defense batteries, swatting torpedoes from the skies in packs. It wasn't enough; Romulan weapons began diving into the battle cruiser, exploding against its shields and armor. The shields held, but the two Romulan warbirds it had moved to engage were now focussing their plasma cannons directly on it.

The warbirds still in front of him suddenly focussed their fire on the Negh'Var, ignoring the others. Plasma bolts slammed into Negh'Var's shields, buffeting the ship left and right along its path. Ha'Sith shifted positions in the formation, seemingly in a move to cover Negh'Var; an instant later, almost a dozen torpedoes all appeared on Kang's threat display, and all of these converged on Ha'Sith in a ripple of bright white detonations. The shields collapsed, Ha'Sith began to tumble, jackknife, and then finally snapped in half at the neck as its command module and drive sections spun away in opposite directions.

And yet, stubborn Ha'Sith continued to fight; the severed command module lit its secondary impulse engines and began to maneuver again, firing point defense phasers to try and clear a path through the torpedoes. The decapitated drive section did the same, albeit with far less control, until another crush of Romulan weapons swarmed around it and the drive section exploded.

"Sir," Mogh announced, suddenly deadpan, "In range."

"All power to weapons," Kang ordered, "Disruptors, _fire_!"

Two small missile silos in Kor'Ah's command module swung open like trap doors and each released a single, small, dagger-like projectile into space. The missiles zipped forward on overcharged impulse engines, glowing like meteorites until they reached a point less than fifty kilometers from the Romulan battleship. At that distance, each missile shattered into a dozen smaller components, and then each component lit a tiny engine of its own and sliced into the battleship even faster than the missile bus that had carried them. They impacted all at once or close to it, and detonations sent ripples of energy through the Romulan shields; those shields flickered and expanded and then vanished altogether.

Kang smiled fiercely. The new "disruptor" weapons did surprisingly little damage to the physical structure of starships, but they ate deflector shields for breakfast and computer circuitry for lunch and god help you if they landed too close to your warp drive. Kroy'Wen, now shieldless and crippled, was as good as his. "Get in close and finish it off!" Kang ordered.

The defending warbirds redoubled their efforts. Concentrated plasma fire struck down all around them and more torpedoes appeared in their path. Negh'Var fired its point defense batteries in a mad defensive barrage, then vanished behind a wall of plasma fire and flew apart at the seems. Further aft, a Ha'Sith's command module fired two pairs of disruptors at the pursing warbirds before a lucky plasma bolt slammed into its bridge and silenced it. The disruptor torpedoes both found their mark, showering one of the warbirds in a cloud of explosions to avenge their fallen launcher. The now shieldless and crippled warbird languished in space for a long moment until it wandered into the sights of the trailing cruisers, the amazingly still-intact Hor'Khan and Mek'Leth, both firing like mad from their main batteries as they tried to catch up with the rest of the mission. The crippled warbird detonated spectacularly, and its partner turned evasive as another salvo of disruptors began to converge around it.

Kang watched his point-defense phasers blast an entire spread of torpedoes out of the sky, watched the distance to the battleship dwindle, watched the details of that wretched war machine resolve to visibility to the naked eye. He watched until he could almost see the Romulan commander glowering at him from the ship's huge command tower.

And he watched as Kor'Ah's main phaser cannons opened fire and twin orange pulses of concentrated fire sliced deeply and repeatedly into the battleship's superstructure. The phaser blasts chipped away the outer hull like the bark of a tree and knocked huge, smoldering chunks out of its engineering section. Finally the phaser bolts struck something sufficiently important, seconds before Kor'Ah shot past at several dozen kilometers per second. Secondary explosions erupted along the flanks of the battleship, then a ripping wave of small ones along the main cannon's long barrel.

Then the battleship Kroy'Wen tore itself in half in a paroxysm of explosions.

"Got him!" Kang whooped, joined by celebratory shouts from the entire crew that terminated only seconds later when a barrage of plasma fire pounded their shields. Kor'Ah began to rock and jerk from the impacts before the pilot officer put the ship back into its serpentine evasive maneuvers. "Full impulse! Get us out of the debris field!"

"Yes! Sir!" The pilot was almost giddy with adrenaline overdose, but his movements were no less deft. Or _daft_ , whatever the case may be; either way, Kor'Ah moved through the debris field in a fast, winding motion more like a guided missile than a piloted starship, exiting the combat zone with the speed and purposefulness that no Romulan warbird could hope to match. Within minutes they were at the edge of the Romulan weapons range, and minutes after that they were near the edge of the debris field itself, rising high above Kronos' equatorial plane. Kang's tactical display showed the Hor'Khan and the Mek'Leth coming up behind him, rejoining his formation smoothly and professionally.

"We're in the clear," the navigation officer announced, "Setting course for rendezvous point. Prepare for FTL in three... two... one..."

The electrogravitic fields that enwrapped the Kor'Ah suddenly piled on until the ship snapped forward as if loaded on a catapult. The warp field and the acceleration crushed all the radiation of the visible universe down to a collapsed spectrum: a bright orange tunnel of incandescence that faded to a deep angry red behind the ship and rose to a haunting violet directly ahead. There was a persistent legend among Klingon pilots that the warp distortion seen by a traveling ship contained the compressed light spectra from every star and planet in all of time and space compressed into a single swirling kaleidoscope of color; that if you pointed a telescope in the right direction and corrected for the immense red/blueshift and axial distortion, you could look across the cosmos and see yourself being born, or look in the opposite direction and see yourself die. Another legend said that if you jumped out of an airlock while the ship was at warp, the warp field distortion would catapult your body across time and space and there's no telling where or when you would end up.

Kang didn't believe in the legends, but they had inspired at least two of his favorite operas. By the time this war was over, the composers would have plenty of new material for inspiration.

"We have successfully exited the combat zone," Mogh reported from the strategic console, "Logged three kills. Two warbirds, one mission and one catastrophic. And one battleship, catastrophic kill. This at the cost of the cruisers Negh'Var and Ha'Sith."

That, Kang thought, was an acceptable trade. K'tingas like Kor'Ah were designed to be built - and if necessary, sacrificed - in huge numbers, but the Romulans only had a handful of battleships like the Kroy'Wen; the Empire could absorb these losses, but the Greenbloods could not. "Are we on course for the Rallying Point?"

"Yes Sir."

"Hail the Klothos."

Mogh transferred power to the ship's main antenna - the concave dome in the "chin" of the command module. For a few moments the big dish glowed fiery red as its internal electronics heated up, and then the subspace radio signal leapt from the bow of the Kor'Ah and reached across the heavens until it reached the waiting transciever of the Klingon battleship IKS Klothos.

General Kor's flagship, of course, was no K'tinga. The ultramodern Klingon battlewagon had been based on (more accurately, Kang knew, "inspired by") the otherworldly technology of the Romulan battleship Narada. It was massive, fast, and carried more firepower than half of the Imperial fleet on its own. It was also _hideous_ ; Kang thought the ship looked like some kind of sea creature that had been left out in the sun too long, and at sublight speeds it maneuvered like one too. For all its immense firepower, the Klothos was just a huge mobile weapons platform that settled its arguments through brute strength alone. In theory, it was more than a match for anything the Romulans could bring to a battle, but Kang also knew that _twelve_ of these ships had been in orbit of Qo'Nos when the first attack came, and none of those were still in fighting shape now.

And with the ruins of a Romulan battleship lying in his wake now, the so-called 'Dreadnought age,' Kang reflected, seemed to be more fashion than function.

Sergeant Mogh announced, "Klothos is responding on the emergency channel."

Kang clenched his teeth. Emergency channel meant the rendezvous point had been compromised. The Romulans had either followed one of the other strike teams back to their anchorage, or their strangely omniscient intelligence services had pulled off yet another miracle. "On screen," he said, and directed his attention to the communications monitor directly below his tactical display.

Kor appeared there, visibly distracted by the fact that half of his command center was on fire and the other half was shaking violently around him as Klingon men and women scrambled both to keep the ship in the fight and keep it from blowing itself up in the process. "Zhai Ha'Lok," Kor said, stroking his mustache as calmly as if the pandemonium behind him was just business-as-usual, "You succeeded?"

"Three enemy kills, including the battleship. What is your situation? We can join the fight in twenty two minutes at..."

"That won't be necessary, General," Kor striked his mustache again, "I am detaching three battalions of infantry along with heavy armor and equipment. The Bortas, the Sami and the Alerai are providing escort. Rendezvous at these coordinates," Kor punched something into a keyboard out of view of the camera, "Then proceed at maximum warp to the Khitomer system."

"Khitomer..." Kang stared at Kor, watching him calmly stroke his mustache as the Romulans shot his flagship full of holes. Kor wasn't exactly a picture of mental health _before_ the war, and now Kang genuinely believed the man had finally lost his mind. "What do I expect to find there?"

"Some new civilian shipyards, some under-developed cities and two or three million refugees."

Kang nodded, beginning to understand. If Kor was redeploying ships like this, it meant they were settling in for a longer campaign than Kang thought. If they were planning a war strategy that would drag out for the three to six months it took to build a new K'Tinga class battlecruiser, the situation must be dire indeed. "What's the rendezvous point after the escort mission?"

Something exploded through a bulkhead behind Kor, showering his command center with tumbling debris. Kor seemed not to notice, even as one of the officers in the frame behind him wailed in pain, clutching a shrapnel wound on his forehead. "There isn't one," Kor said, "Stay at Khitomer. I need you to defend that colony in case the Romulans go after Narendra Three or Hakori. You can consider that your new home port until further notice."

Kang almost couldn't believe his ears. "You're putting us on colony defense? What about re-taking the homeworld?"

"Kang," the older General stared at him thorough the screen, frowning, "Praxis is gone. Ty'Gokor is gone. The First City is gone. Old Hakor, Aram'sa, Krios... all _gone_. There is no homeworld left to retake, my friend. It is just an empty shell of a planet that soon will be incapable of supporting life."

"If that's the case, _why_ have we been fighting so hard to lift this siege? Why not regroup and defend the survi-" Kang trailed off and his eyes widened as he realized, suddenly, that Kor had just ordered him to do exactly that.

"The Romulans didn't come here to topple the Empire," Kor went on, "They are here to exterminate the Klingon race. They are even bypassing military targets now to strike our population centers directly. As for me, I am out of the fight for now. Klothos is dead in space, no power, no weapons. If not for the huge mass of Klothos' hull soaking up their plasma fire, I would have been dead an hour ago."

"You are planning to evacuate at some point?" Kang asked.

"I'm waiting for the Romulans to get tired of shooting at us and try for a boarding action. I'd like to get some close-quarters action before I abandon ship. I do have a fallback position, if that's what you're asking. Don't concern yourself with me. My remaining forces will keep their attention focussed on Homestar, that will buy you some time to prepare for their onslaught. In the mean time, build up whatever forces you can, because when the Romulans are finished with us, _you_ will be next."

"Qa'plah, General Kor. Fight well." Kang closed the channel, then thumbed the intercom switch for the pilot house. "Torg, we've been sent updated rendezvous coordinates."

"I have them, Sir. Shall I adjust course?"

"Yes. And once we make the rendezvous, set course for the Khitomer system at warp six."

"Khitomer, Sir? That's an independent colony, isn't it? Not part of the Empire."

Kang's stomach suddenly twisted into a knot as he tried to swallow those words. _Not part of the Empire._ He could not even be sure there was an Empire to not be part of; three quarters of the Klingon race still lived on Qo'Nos, and if the homeworld was beyond hope, what sort of empire was a sprawl of garrison towns, understaffed outposts and suburban retreats for wealthy nobles?

The Empire-in-name-only had given him his orders, though. Kang was not about to refuse them. "Our orders are to change that," he said officiously, "We'll be annexing the Khitomer planets in order to support the Klingon war effort!"

Sergeant Mogh added gently, "General, with only six cruisers and three battalions, we don't have the military strength to take a world that size. If the colonists don't cooperate..."

"For all intents and purposes, we _are_ the Klingon Empire," Kang said, "We will follow normal imperial procedure, just like we always do, and claim that colony for the glory of the Empire"

"What if the colonists resist?"

Kang snorted a laugh, "Then the colony will claim _us_. It makes no difference to me. Kor has ordered me to protect that colony and that is exactly what I intend to do."

* * *

Star Trek: Exodus is a fan-fiction novella written by CrazyEddie (crazyeddie404 ). I hope you all enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

More to come in the series, so stay tuned! Reviews are encouraged, constructive criticism welcome!

\- Crazy Eddie's _Five Year Mission_ Series -

#1 Star Trek: Genesis

#2 Star Trek: Exodus

#3 Star Trek: Khitomer (Spring, 2016)

#4 Star Trek: Testament (Fall, 2016)


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